BitTorrent Inc, the developer of the well-known file-sharing software uTorrent, will allow content creators to charge for their content since September. The new “paywall” option is supposed to generate a healthy revenue stream for the indie artists. The movie producer Marco Weber will become one of them – he is going to share a pilot of his upcoming TV show “Children of the Machine” if BitTorrent users donate $2.5 mln for its release.

BitTorrent Inc. has started its artist promotion program several years ago, in the attempt to allow content creators to share their work for free to millions of BitTorrent users worldwide. Thanks to BitTorrent’s massive user base of over 170 million people, the program has proved very successful. Moreover, apart from promotion, a number of artists can now see some hard cash in return using the “paygate” BitTorrent Inc. would launch this September.

The so called “walled” material can only be accessed and shared after a downloader pays a fixed fee to the artist. In order to prevent users from sharing it without permission, the company is planning to put some restrictions in place.

The idea was announced back in 2013 and movie producer Marco Weber decided to try it in the wild. Weber is going to release a pilot of the new TV series “Children of the Machine” via BitTorrent, and people who like it may want to pay less than $10 to buy the entire series.

This is a sort of a crowdfunding campaign: if file-sharers like the show, they can buy the entire series in advance, and once the moviemakers get 250K subscribers, the first season will be produced. As usual, if the project fails to reach its goal, the series will never be produced. Industry experts point out that this is a serious possibility, because no artists have ever raised more than a few thousand dollars.

However, the makers of the show are sure that their project will be successful, with BitTorrent’s power of 170 million users already familiar with downloading TV shows, though illegally. The problem is that they normally don’t want to choose legitimate sources because that it takes too long before the show becomes available. So, it is not clear whether they will be willing to prepay a series months in advance.

The VODO platform has also used a similar system to raise funds before – in cooperation with The Pirate Bay and other torrent trackers they helped to crowdfund the TV series “Pioneer One”.