Attended by over 2,500 executives last year, the Streaming Media West conference is back in Silicon Valley this week. Yesterday, Ashwin opened up the conference with a Welcome Keynote Address talking about the state of streaming media, the power of peer networking, and concluded with a live demo of BitTorrent DNA. I was surprised to see the room packed promptly by 9:00 a.m. with at least 400+ conference delegates. Furthermore, based on the pack of people who rushed the stage to speak with Ashwin immediately following his address, it’s evident that the industry wants to understand how best to leverage P2P technology for their content delivery needs. In fact, to address these issues, our CTO Eric Klinker recently contributed an article to streamingmedia.com to help educate content publishers on their content delivery options.
Also taking place at Streaming Media West today is the culmination of their First Annual Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards. A total of 92 companies submitted almost 120 products and services, and more than 3,000 readers of Streaming Media magazine and StreamingMedia.com logged their votes. Winners were selected by readers as companies that most exemplified technological and business innovation. BitTorrent was the winner and will be the recipient tonight of the top honors for “P2P Delivery Network.”
“This is a tremendous opportunity for us to acknowledge not just the winners of these awards but the continued growth and vitality of the streaming media industry,” said Streaming Media editor Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen. “The winners exemplify technological and business innovation, as well as outstanding customer service and brand messaging. I think the fact that the winners were chosen by end users makes them all the more meaningful.”
Verizon recently announced a new symmetric broadband service offering that should be music to the ears of any Web 2.0 business or participant. “20/20”, as the service is called, sees clearly the future of the Internet and the ever increasing levels of user participation being driven by the Web 2.0 phenomenon. And with that insight, Verizon delivers the right product at the right time to capture and drive these trends.
Users’ contributions to applications are only increasing. From the early roots of user contributed content via blogs, video and wikis to the user-contributed applications of open platforms, widgets and open source; user contributions are increasingly making their way to the very infrastructure of the applications themselves. Peer-to-peer content delivery is a great example, where users give a little in terms of idle computer cycles and broadband access, and in return they see faster and more efficient downloads. Give a little, and get a lot in return; it’s part of our social fabric and core to our value system.
Upstream capacity is the oxygen of Web 2.0 and without it participation is limited, painful or pointless. Asymmetric Internet service providers are in essence telling you that your participation is not wanted, that you cannot be a part of this growing community. But with an order of magnitude more upstream capacity than anything in the market today, FIOS instead will enable a new generation of Web 2.0 applications and a new wave of innovation on the Internet. The community has a bright future indeed.
“Asymmetric Internet connections are as useful as phones where you can only listen”. – BitTorrent Engineer for DNA and open source developer.
Today marks another milestone for BitTorrent, Inc. as we launch a wholly-owned subsidiary, BitTorrent Japan, to address the needs of the Japanese market. We already have established relationships with Japanese content publishers and CE manufacturers, including Kadokawa, Buffalo Technology and Planex Communications, but by setting up shop in the heart of Tokyo, we’ll be able to better provide direct development, sales and engineering support to our growing base of local Japanese customers. As Ashwin has stated, “We are intrigued by Japan’s advanced broadband environment that exists as a result of innovation and competition among ISPs. BitTorrent has the ability to leverage the capacity that exists within the Japanese Internet to create great user experiences for online applications while dramatically reducing infrastructure costs for publishers.”
As part of launching BitTorrent Japan, Ashwin is in Tokyo this week speaking at the New Context Conference hosted by Joi Ito (head of Technorati Japan). Here’s footage from Ashwin’s speech entitled “Changing Hollywood.”
We’ve launched a new self-publishing feature designed for high-quality independent music, film and TV content. Our programming team has been hard at work reviewing submissions and extending BitTorrent Publisher invitations to an initial group of independent content creators. It’s now easier than ever to share and showcase your work to an audience of over 150 million BitTorrent users worldwide. Not to mention, you also gain exposure alongside titles from the world’s leading movie studios, TV networks and record labels, such as 20th Century Fox, MTV Networks and Sub Pop Records.
If you’ve published with us in the past, we hope you’ll dig the improvements over the previous publishing interface, including the free file hosting, drag & drop uploading, and the ability to add more specific information about your works. If you are brand new to publishing, we think you’ll find the process really simple. Look forward to seeing your stuff on the site soon.
BitTorrent’s very own Ashwin Navin spoke at the Creative Commons Salon in San Francisco on August 8th, 2007. The CC Salon is a monthly event focused on building a community of artists and developers around Creative Commons licenses, standards, and technology. This month’s event also featured lightning presentations of CC’s Summer Intern projects, as well as a presentation by Fedora at Red Hat’s Jack Aboutboul. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements about BitTorrent and Creative Commons.
We’ve made it a little easier to find new, popular stuff on BitTorrent. Check out the links for What’s Hot, New Releases, Just Added, and Browse All under each section on the lefthand side.
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