iTunes adds more movie titles

More bad news for the BitTorrent Entertainment Network.

iTunes, the world's most popular online movie download store, has announced that movies from Lionsgate films will be available for download on the site starting today.

Among the titles to be included are “Terminator 2,” “LA Story,” “Basic Instinct,” “The Blair Witch Project," "Dirty Dancing,” “Total Recall,” " Rambo,” “Monster’s Ball,”“Chaplin,” and “The Boys From Brazil.”

“We’re delighted to offer these incredibly popular Lionsgate films on iTunes, and look forward to adding even more films in the future,” said Steve Beeks, president of Lionsgate. “iTunes lets users download these wonderful films to watch on their computer, TV or iPod, so movie fans can take their favorite Lionsgate films with them anywhere.”

Downloaded movies are still mostly priced at around $9.99 USD each, with older movies usually costing less than the newer releases.

This could mean additional trouble for the BitTorrent Entertainment Network which up until now had a collection of movie download titles that far surpassed that of iTunes. With this news, iTunes can now offer much more than the simple Disney content as it was previously limited to.

Perhaps Disney titles served as an excellent test case for the system itself and that of concerns over copyright protections, finally making a movie studio comfortable enough to come forward and embrace it.

In any event, download speeds aside, if iTunes begins to evenly match movie title selection with BEN, coupled with the fact that playback, DRM, and BitTorrent client server considerations are ongoing issue for it, it just may mean that iTunes will make BEN both irrelevant and undesirable in the minds of most consumers.