One of the wizards behind the cult hit “Blair Witch Project” has launched a new Webisode called “The Strand” today on the internet. One of its stars is Katherine Helmond who played Jessica Tate in the hit TV show (and one of my personal favorites of all time): Soap.

The first episode of The Strand is available as a bittorent download and you can get a free guest pass through Bitpass. Exciting, huh?

Well, it had potential.

Hands down this has been the worst DRM situation I’ve ever faced, but more on that in a moment. First the article from CNN:

A lot has changed since unexpected blockbuster “Blair Witch” introduced the mainstream entertainment industry to the term “viral marketing.” “The Strand” is designed for independent online distribution, an approach that wasn’t possible in 1999.

For a moment let me slightly disagree with CNN that this approach “wasn’t possible” in 1999. Online content serials for a fee have been available for longer than 1999 on the web. Bitpass and Bittorent possibly weren’t around, but the general method of distribution on a pay-per-fee model via the web isn’t anything revolutionary or new. And, as I’m about to lay down, I’m almost completely convinced it’s greatly inferior to traditional methods of distribution (Theater to DVDs). Many may dislike the greedy MPAA, but that model of distribution is a no brainer for Joe Consumer.

Here are the steps I went through to simply try and watch today’s debut webisode of The Strand, and please keep in mind that I’m a fairly geeky guy, this isn’t my first computer and/or day on the internet:

1. I received an email notification to go download my ‘free gift’ along with some instructions. Let’s take a look at the “easy” six step process to watch this movie:

2. Seems pretty straightforward and I’ve bought a movie via Bitpass in the past (another independent film called: Nothing So Strange). The first thing I noticed was that this used bittorent, and I use the Azureus bittorent client. Fortunately, I’d already gone through the firewall configuration for that program, but for those who haven’t and are sitting behind a firewall (or multiple firewalls) this could be issue #1 that stops the process from being smooth.

One thing I don’t like about bittorrent is it is slower than a traditional download. Even if you are a fast seeder, it’s still slower than a traditional click and download from a faster server using a cable connection. The 618MB download took nearly three hours to finish whereas through a traditional download it would have been about half that time. In the meantime I’m uploading parts of the same movie to other leeches.

People don’t want to wait three hours for anything they are paying for (which is the plan after the first webisode) and at the estimated 99 cents per episode charge this could be a significant hurdle that “Blair Witch” never had to deal with. It’s not the money, it’s the time. Just give me the DVD for $5 with some cool extras and four or five episodes at a time.

Once the bittorent file finished downloading I clicked on the link and it took me to the puzzling white screen from Internet Explorer. Thank you, Microsoft, for all that information! (heavy sarcasm) Not shown in the screencap was a gray popup box (the alert box) which told me that I needed to have Windows Media Player installed.

Hello, I had WMP 10 installed. And as for familiarity with DRM? I was a paying Napster customer online for almost a year and have done lots of DRM license backups and transfers on this very machine –so there shouldn’t have been any problem with WMP being installed on the system.

Next I did some searching through Google to see if I could figure out what this problem might be and it led me to this page from Microsoft explaining how to backup to a different directory the DRM licenses, reinstall WMP and then try again. I did this and it required a reboot. When I rebooted I had a new problem:

WTF? Code has been redeemed? By who? I hadn’t gotten it to work the first time! I figurred, uh oh, three plus hours down the drain and now I am going to have to pay the .99 cent fee, so I reinstalled WMP 10 again and rebooted again hoping that something would change.

Thankfully, it did:

Now I had a license on the system that I could access and I was home free watching The Strand, right?

Wrong:

Apparently I was missing an audio codec for Windows Media Player 9. Why do I need a codec for WMP 9.0 when I’m using WMP 10? There is no explanation but I go to the download page anyway and download the codec. I install once and then try to load The Strand movie. It buffers up to 100% and then I get the same audio codec error message. I wonder if maybe I have to reboot, so I reboot a third time. Now when I try to connect I’m seeing something like this:

So is the traffic so busy for everybody watching The Strand that it’s just not getting through? I go and download and then install the codecs again from the page below which, again, is providing very little actual help or explanation to what the problem really is about. Scoble, who writes these pages?

This is where I am currently stuck and it’s a good five plus hours later and still no ability to watch The Strand. Good thing I got some other work done while this was happening.

With the Blair Witch my wife and I just walked into the theater, paid for our tickets, got popcorn and watched the movie. Distribution on the web via Bitpass and bittorent and using the WMP DRM? I’m not sure how many people will go to this much trouble — especially with a for-pay serialized online story. I hope the story is that good, I still haven’t been able to access it. Good luck to those taking the plunge!

Did this post make you go hmm?

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