Archive for July, 2010

µTorrent Web Now Available on iPad and Android

by smorris on July 29, 2010 in Announcements with 6 Comments

Since launching µTorrent Web for iPhone, users have been clamoring for something similar on other devices. So, today we are very excited to announce support for the iPad and Android platform – including the Nexus One and Google Ion devices. Now you can control torrents via your web browser on a PC, iPhone, iPad and Android.

In case you are new to µTorrent Web, we will rewind a bit and tell you exactly what it is. µTorrent Web is a way to allow users to manage their downloads from anywhere on the Internet via a web browser. So, hypothetically, before you leave work or school in the evening you could start a torrent download on your home computer via another PC, iPhone, Android or iPad, so that it is completed by the time you arrive home.

What makes this different from other web-UI-for-bittorrent-client products is the incredible simplicity of setting it up. There’s no complicated port-forwarding or confusing settings in your router or firewall. Just set up a username and password in your µTorrent 3.0 alpha client, and presto you’re ready to go! (Be sure that you have the latest client with µTorrent Web installed on your computer.) It’s also a good idea to check “stay signed in” to ensure quick and easy accessibility in the future.

Just like with µTorrent Web for iPhone, we continue to take users’ privacy very seriously – all your private data is encrypted from the moment it leaves your browser right to the client on the other end. So, as before, you can rest assured that the private details of your µTorrent usage are never exposed to BitTorrent Inc. or any third parties.

We are excited to expand µTorrent Web to other devices, and look forward to continuing to roll it out further. If you have suggestions for other devices, let us know via our Idea Bank.

- Simon -

Use BitTorrent 24/7 with Buffalo NAS

by Brett Nishi on July 28, 2010 in Other with 1 Comment

Ever put off that Torrent download because you and your laptop had somewhere else to be?  What if you had an always-on device to do your torrenting; manage your media; and stream it throughout your house?  Oh yeah, and what if it was nearly silent and used less power than your desk lamp?  Sound cool?  Well, the new line of Buffalo Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices running BitTorrent Embedded makes it possible in a powerful, convenient and affordable package.

Our embedded licensing program enables hardware makers to integrate BitTorrent technologies into their products to manage content delivery, optimize networking and open their products to the global BitTorrent consumer ecosystem. In partnership with Buffalo Technologies, a provider of networking, storage, multimedia and memory solutions, we are launching the newest version of our BitTorrent Embedded SDK client. Version 3.0 unveils the full power of the world’s most popular BitTorrent clients to low-power embedded Linux devices.

Users of µTorrent will find the experience with BitTorrent Embedded familiar – starting with the user interface.  The new Buffalo products all feature the same web based UI that ships with µTorrent for Windows.  This fast, full featured interface gives you complete control of your downloads and access to a host of new features.  Under the covers this new version also features native support for µTP, our new upgraded transport protocol that dynamically controls BitTorrent’s bandwidth usage to keep from congesting your home connection. µTP is a must have feature for an always on device.  Buffalo’s NAS devices with BitTorrent also feature:

- Super low power consumption – starting at 24 Watts (varies depending on model)

- Activity scheduler to control torrent operation and accommodate variable bandwidth usage schemes

- Bandwidth cap to limit torrent downloads for users subject to ISP imposed data plan limits

- DLNA certified server to stream media directly to compatible gaming consoles, set-top-boxes and TVs

- Remote access to user files through the www.buffalonas.com service

We are excited that consumers can now enjoy a full PC like BitTorrent experience on a tiny, energy conserving and affordable device.  This new client comes pre-installed on the following new Buffalo Technology LinkStation and Terrastation products: LS-XHL, LS-WXL, LS-WSXL, TS-XL, TS-RXL, TX-WX, TS-XEL, TS-XHL, and is available as a free upgrade for existing owners of these models.

Learn more about the new devices at Buffalotech.com and get your own today!

- Brett -

What is the Right Business Model on the Internet?

by smorris on July 27, 2010 in Other with 1 Comment

What is the right business model on the Internet? For the most part, organizations are still trying to find the balance between how to create value for consumers and a sustainable business model.

In case you haven’t noticed, media scarcity has for all intents and purposes disappeared. The Internet is essentially a giant copy machine that makes distribution of content frictionless. So, when you think about the web in these terms, then it makes it easy to understand why pay walls on the Internet do not work.

For example, take The Times of London, which recently implemented a pay wall. Last week, The Guardian reported that since instituting the pay wall The Times had lost 90 percent of its online traffic. The fact is the news that they are reporting is no longer scarce. Readers can easily find something similar (or even identical) on another competing website, or better they can find it on Twitter or a blog. The Times has created a model based on metering access, and in the process has lost eyeballs, which will almost certainly result in lost ad revenue.

As distribution costs reach effectively zero, we believe that there is value to be derived not in just access, but in creating an experience for users. In the future rich media will not have to be held under a lock and key to make money, which could result in a very different business model.

So, creators and organizations that are serious about making a business work on the Internet are looking to alternative media models – many of which fall under an umbrella you might loosely label freemium. The fact is that even with the shift from physical to digital media, the simple Economics 101 notion that consumers will pay for what is valuable and scarce still rings true.

We are partnering with various creators from filmmakers to gamers to software vendors – to enable relationships that bring value to the consumer, but allow the creator to build a business that works. These business models are largely based on this concept of freemium, where they leverage consumer adoption of values freely given to drive an opportunity for value to be captured later. We are still early in this process, but early results look very promising.

If you are interested in learning more about how freemium can be used as part of a business, I will be participating in a webinar with Mike Masnick of the popular blog Techdirt and Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote tomorrow at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET on the topic. Get the details here.

- Simon -

‘The Yes Men Fix the World – P2P Edition’ Now Available on BitTorrent

by smorris on July 23, 2010 in Announcements with 1 Comment

If you haven’t heard of the Yes Men, chances are you have heard of some of their stunts. The Yes Men are a culture jamming activist-duo raising awareness around social problems caused by corporations. They practice a concept they call identity correction, where they impersonate entities that they dislike. From their offices in Milwaukee, Wis., they create and maintain fake websites similar to ones they intend to spoof, which have successfully led to numerous interviews, conferences and TV talk show invitations.

The Yes Men have won tons of awards and accolades for their films – including the Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Their work has been seen at Sundance, Hot Docs and was the closing film at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. The one thing that they have yet to see via traditional distribution is actual money. That is right, these poor suckers are actually broke. So, what are these prankster filmmakers to do? With the help of VODO and BitTorrent, today they are releasing ‘The Yes Men Fix the World – P2P Edition,’ a special cut of their second feature film. What is more this version includes an exclusive video of the Yes Men impersonating the US Chamber of Commerce. It is so outrageous that the US Chamber of Commerce took the Yes Men to court!

So, the filmmakers are asking viewers if they like the film to donate, so that they can create more mischief in the future. They have created different levels of participation, and for as little as $10 someone can become a card-carrying Yes Lab member and be entered into a drawing to win a prize! Learn more about the different levels of participation here.

This release comes on the heels of Pioneer One, which has seen nearly a million downloads and over $40,000 in donations and sponsorship. We continue to be excited about alternative media models that feed off the strengths of the online world, and we’re optimistic about the future that this will create for the Yes Men.

At this point, it is no secret that BitTorrent is an efficient way to distribute content to the masses. The story that is now beginning to unfold is that leveraging BitTorrent distribution, creators can tap into a powerful online community and reach millions of consumers while earning the money that will allow them to continue with their creative endeavors.

The Yes Men’s film is a good example of a film that never would have seen such broad distribution via the traditional model. The Internet has created a model of empowerment that allows creators to retain full control of their creative works, and now BitTorrent and VODO are helping them build a business model that will work in this digital age.

For those who are using Apps for µTorrent, the Yes Men can be downloaded from within the client via the VODO app. Also, for a limited time starting today, the movie will be available with all fresh downloads of the µTorrent client.

- Simon -

Reflections on Apps

by smorris on July 14, 2010 in Other with No comments

Here at BitTorrent Inc. we’re quite excited about Apps and what they will add to the BitTorrent community. However, we’ve seen a number of questions and concerns. These seem to fall into two camps – to very roughly paraphrase:

1. “Whoa, you’re going to ruin µTorrent – its going to get bloated?”

2. “What’s all the fuss about – what can I do with Apps anyway?”

As for the first question, what I can say is that we continue to obsess about performance, speed, binary footprint, RAM profile, CPU efficiency, simplifying the user experience and pretty much anything else that might go into a broad category of “don’t let it get bloated.” Our most recent software development sprint was dedicated to anything that our engineers could think of to reduce size or improve performance. Our software continues to be the category leader in terms of tiny footprint versus performance and features. This will not change.

Our “Apps” platform provides extra functionality that is always going to be optional. One way to think of this is an antidote to feature-creep. All sorts of new features that might be useful or interesting can be introduced as separate Apps before we ever bake them into the core client. If they do not prove to be essential then it’s unlikely they will ever end up as core features. If you want the barest possible BitTorrent experience then don’t install any Apps! There will even be a way to switch Apps off entirely. Although, we hope people will at least give some of them a try before they resort to this.

As for the second question of not knowing what new features Apps will bring. Although, rather like the early days of the Facebook app platform, we think the raw materials are really quite exciting. To start with I’d say that what we have is clearly *not* Facebook. At least not quite…

We are approaching one hundred million consumers intensively using a download manager to get content from each other. Put more generally, our client-base combines a gigantic amount of consumer attention with access to a large set of connections between people. These connections are not social in nature – as in, I’m not connected to my friends. The connections form a different type of “graph” – not a “social graph,” but a “behavioral graph”. Why so? The BitTorrent protocol works such that you only ever connect to other people who are downloading the exact same thing as you. It’s a world where the choice to download something results in joining a group of other people who are also downloading the same thing. Now we’re adding Apps on top of this behavioral graph.

Fundamentally, Apps are just miniature websites and web services that are tightly integrated with the client. We have had a Web API for some time – allowing for a browser-based user interface so that you can “log in” to your BitTorrent client from a different device. Apps tie the browser much more closely to the client and provide a security wrapper to keep things under the explicit control of the end user.

Most obviously, Apps will give you access to a BitTorrent download manager, which excels at downloading large popular files at little or no cost to the publisher. Apps can be used to simply make this experience better – add a more powerful scheduler or prettier speed graphs. Beyond this, Apps might provide a slick discovery mechanism for content that you want to download. On the flip side, it would be an excellent way for a content creator to package up content for distribution to millions of people.

Apps integrated with web content for discovery is just the start. Apps can also easily integrate with web services to create content-centric mashups. Services might take your user name (we’re supporting “OAuth” – an authorization standard so Apps can include web services you can log in to) along with groups of IP addresses, which share an affinity along with infohashes and other content meta-data as inputs. As for outputs? We can think of interesting new types of media discovery, sharing, consumption, affinity-based social interaction, commenting, ratings, recommendations, community visualizations, gaming, commerce, advertising — all organized around content delivery and affinities. And of course each App is completely optional.

We’re building a platform for developers to write open source Apps, and share them with the community. In the end, the power of this platform remains with you. The key will be what experiences App developers decide to build, and what users decide to adopt.

- Simon -

Announcing Apps for µTorrent Developers Challenge and SDK

by smorris on July 12, 2010 in Announcements with 16 Comments

Apps for µTorrent is something that we are really passionate about. For us, it is a natural and important evolution of µTorrent. It is a way for users to create a personalized experience by adding Apps that offer new features and services that are important to them – without compromising the lightness that they have come to love with µTorrent.

Another important component of Apps for µTorrent is the developer community. Apps that inspire new and innovative uses of µTorrent – built by developers – are an important part of our vision. With that said, we are happy to announce the first ever Developers Challenge. Starting today developers worldwide are encouraged to create Apps that will highlight new use cases and redefine how µTorrent is being used.

The contest will run from Monday, July 12, 2010 until Friday, August 13, 2010. (The contest rules and overview can be found here.) For the purposes of the Developers Challenge, Apps will be judged on the following criteria:

- Originality and innovation – new and creative applied uses of µTorrent and the BitTorrent protocol
- Quality of product, visual and user experience – application design that showcases great interaction and visual design
- Product or service appeal – the appeal your application has to the overall µTorrent community
- Technical expertise – how well the product functions based on its overall usage description

We have already had a number of organizations integrate with us and create Apps for µTorrent including VODO, TuneUp, Outspark, Clearbits, Raptr and BitDefender. Check them out – they may serve as a source of inspiration.

Today, we are also announcing the general availability of Apps for BitTorrent SDK, a software development kit (SDK) designed to allow developers a simple way to incorporate content and services into a simple user experience that integrates seamlessly with µTorrent. The SDK also includes a collection of tools, libraries and documentation to make the process of creating, authoring and testing apps as easy as possible. The ecosystem will be completely open, so anyone will be able to create and distribute an App.

We look forward to your feedback on our SDK as well as all the exciting App submissions!

Resources:

- Get the SDK
- Apps Online Forum
- Learn more and enter the challenge

- Simon -

µTorrent 3.0 alpha and More Apps!

by smorris on July 9, 2010 in Announcements with 9 Comments

Recently, we rolled out µTorrent 3.0 alpha, which merged together the Falcon 2.1 and the Apps being introduced in our Griffin project into a single build. (To read the full list of upgrades, check out our forum.) So, what does that all mean? Now in one client users can enjoy:

- µTorrent Web allows you to enjoy ultra-secure remote web access through a simple web service where you can manage your torrent clients from anywhere on the Internet via a web browser on a PC or an iPhone.
- BitTorrent streaming provides you with more of a point-click-watch experience by allowing you to start watching content before the download has completed.
- Apps for µTorrent provides web-based extensions, which gives you the option to add a wide array of new functionality and services via Apps without compromising the renowned lightness of the µTorrent client.

We are also very excited to be releasing some additional Apps that are now available for download from within the client. As before, all Apps are completely optional, so you can choose to add only the ones you like in order to keep your client as lightweight as possible. The new Apps now available for download include:

- TuneUp is a plug-in for iTunes and Windows Media Player that helps clean up your mislabeled songs in your playlist – this version includes special BitTorrent support too.
- Outspark offers free massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG).
- µBrowse is a search tool that allows you to easily locate downloaded files from within your client.
- ClearBits distributes high quality, Creative-Commons-licensed digital media, datasets, and artwork for Content Creators.
- Tetronimoes is our version of a popular geometric shape game to pass the time while you are waiting for your downloads to complete.

Apps for µTorrent is something that we continue to work on internally. Stay tuned for more announcements around Apps.

- Simon -

Pioneer One: A New Media Model Success Story

by smorris on July 8, 2010 in Featured Content with 2 Comments

Less than a month ago, Pioneer One, an original made for BitTorrent series, debuted on VODO.net (a BitTorrent Inc. partner). Its creators Josh Bernhard and Bracey Smith sought to create a quality sci-fi drama outside the traditional media model.

Using proven distribution channels on the Internet – like BitTorrent – to connect with viewers, Josh and Bracey saw their pilot episode downloaded over 500,000 times and they raised $20,000 in donations and $10,000 in sponsorship from MOFILM. All within 10 days! Their results are especially impressive when you consider that most filmmakers cannot expect to get more than $50,000 for a twenty-year all-media license for a non-genre feature, according to Ted Hope, producer of such films as Adventureland and 21 Grams.

Pioneer One achieved this success at a time when many remain skeptical about content creators ability to monetize content online. So, it is no surprise that there has been a lot of interest in this alternative media model (See: TorrentFreak, NewTeeVee, TechDirt, New York Times). Moreover, BitTorrent allowed Josh and Bracey to tap into online communities and reach millions of people who might otherwise be inaccessible, while also helping them create buzz on social networks like Twitter. These communities are powerful and provide intrinsic value for any indie filmmaker trying to build a fan base.

For creators, the Internet and distribution platforms like BitTorrent also create a model of empowerment that allows them to take control of their own future. We look forward to more episodes of Pioneer One, as well as working with other creators who are interested in new media models.

- Simon -