Archive for September, 2010

Announcing Artist Pilot Program and New Apps

by eklinker on September 27, 2010 in Announcements with 9 Comments

Today is the first day of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, and we have a couple of exciting announcements to share.

First, if you check your new apps feature (recently released in the new BitTorrent Mainline client and the µTorrent beta), you’ll find two cool new apps.

The first brings the world-famous TEDTalks directly to you, offering instant, one-click downloads of the latest inspiring and dynamic and educational presentations by well-known personalities in the fields of technology, entertainment, design, business and global development. The concept behind TED is “ideas worth spreading” and through the power of BitTorrent, we’re doing our part to get the word out.

Second, we’re very excited to announce the winner of the µTorrent Developer Challenge. Zulu Music – developed by Steven Viola – gives you an opportunity to discover and download new artists for free via the Jamendo API. Congratulations Steven! His app appears today along with the TED app.

Last but certainly not least, we’re celebrating the unveiling of a new pilot program designed to help connect artists directly with our millions of users. The Featured Artist program offers musicians and filmmakers the ability to submit their work for consideration for special promotions. After our successful work with the filmmakers behind Yes Men, Pioneer One and the popular musician PAZ, we’d like to give other artists a chance to explore this new and unique distribution model.  Artists can upload their creations at www.bittorrent.com/artists for a chance to be spotlighted. Please help spread the word!

-Eric-

BitTorrent Mainline for Mac 7.0

by bnishi on September 24, 2010 in Announcements with 5 Comments

Today we are updating BitTorrent Mainline for Mac to version 7.0. Now all of our consumer clients share the same underlying BitTorrent download engine. Version 7.0 is a native cocoa client for Mac OSX 10.5+ Universal, and shares the same high speed and low resource benefits of our Windows version. BTML Mac users can now enjoy the bandwidth and network management automation of μTP, as well as all the modern BitTorrent enhancements of DHT, PEX, Protocol Encryption and magnet link handling.  Or to put it simply, with this new engine, BTML is faster, easier and more powerful than ever. In the coming weeks, we’ll continue to add new features and improve the client, so take it for a spin and let us know what you think in the comments.

-Brett-

Crunch Time! BitTorrent at TechCrunch Disrupt

by BitTorrent on September 23, 2010 in Other with No comments

Just a heads up that the BitTorrent team will be at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon and Conference. The schedule of events is below, so if you’re at the show please stop by and say hello. We’ll be talking about our latest experiments in connecting content creators and consumers, including case studies on the Pioneer One, Yes Men and PAZ launches, and looking to connect with people and partners looking to the future.

 

TechCrunch Disrupt @ the San Francisco Design Center Concourse

Hackathon (September 25-26)

BitTorrent API Workshop: 4 p.m. Saturday

BitTorrent Developer Station: Open 1 p.m. Saturday until 11 a.m. Sunday. (We may take a break to sleep for a few hours after midnight.)

 

Main Conference (September 27-29)

Exhibition Area: Look for our table!

Hope to see you there!

Shared Film Festival at the Open Video Conference

by BitTorrent on September 14, 2010 in Other with 1 Comment

Over the past few months we have worked with several indie artists to distribute their work via BitTorrent. As a company, this is something that we are passionate about, because we think there is great potential for artists to leverage the distribution economics of BitTorrent to reach a large and engaged audience to not only build a fan base but create a sustainable business

Shared Film Festival at OVC is Open to the General Public

model that allows them to create future works. We are encouraged by the results that we have had with VODO on the Pioneer One and The Yes Men Fix the World – P2P Edition releases, and most recently with PAZ’s mixtape “Young Broke and Fameless.”

So, in conjunction with the Open Video Conference (OVC) we are excited to launch the Shared Film Festival (SFF). The festival will bring notable films from creators who are experimenting with alternative media models and distribution to the big screen. The filmmakers will be on hand to present their stories, experiences and business approaches. SFF gives creators and audiences alike an opportunity to engage in a larger dialogue about shared culture and peer-to-peer distribution with other filmmakers, creators, funders and members of the general public not yet familiar with this rich, developing culture.

Each night following OVC, we’ll screen a short film, a feature length production, and then sit down to a discussion with the filmmakers, learning about the stories behind the films; their production experiences; and business strategies. We are excited to announce that The Yes Men will be in-person to screen their film during the first evening. On the second night, we will be screening a new film, “Person of Interest,” and the writer/star and director of the film will also be on hand. (The full schedule is below.)

So, as if the event could not get any better, we are opening it up to the general public for FREE! We are very excited about this event, and hope to see you there!

Friday, Oct. 1, 2010, 7 p.m.

 

Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010, 7 p.m.

  • VODO Short Film – Lilah by Nathaniel Hansen
  • Full-length feature: Person of Interest by Gregory Bayne
  • Panel
    • Gregory Bayne, director of Person of Interest
    • J. Reuben Appelman, writer and star of Person of Interest
    • Moderator – Brian Newman, founder of Sub-Genre and former CEO of Tribeca Film Institute

The Arrival of Apps

by smorris on September 9, 2010 in Announcements with 5 Comments

We’ve always strived to make the BitTorrent client simple and useful, basing our design philosophy around this core ideal. At the same time, we recognize there are many features that may enhance your experience – by choice.

The solution? Apps. Available today for the first time in a new release candidate build of the BitTorrent Mainline client (the 7.1 Release Candidate version available below the download button on the homepage, or here), we’re introducing apps to provide a flexible, easy way to add and extend BitTorrent functionality, discover new media/games/software, and lots of other cool things at your leisure.

While only available today as a release candidate, over the next several weeks we will issue the production release to roll it out to all BitTorrent Mainline users.

Apps for BitTorrent are built on a JavaScript-based extension framework and make it easy for users to discover and download digital media without ever leaving the client. To kick off this limited release, we’re launching with 11 apps, ranging from useful to fun, enabling you to create a personalized BitTorrent experience by adding new features and services. For example, add virus protection with Virus Guard (powered by BitDefender), or clean up mislabeled songs in your playlist with TuneUp. See a map of all the peers in your swarm with uMap or organize all your torrents and downloaded files with uBrowse. Even share your torrents with TorrentTweet. More apps are coming soon.

The best part – we encourage all third-party developers to write and publish new apps, meaning that the breadth of creative ideas of apps to come is unlimited. And if you’re a developer yourself, you can now write an app available to BitTorrent’s millions of users using the SDK Developer tools.

The apps platform on BitTorrent Mainline 7.1 is completely open, and allows for easy extensibility by independent developers through a simple API. Partners and independent developers can access all the functionality of the client and offer a simple and more integrated way for consumers to find and download different types of content as well as integrate with external services that add new functionality.  In addition, the SDK developer tools and all the Apps we release from BitTorrent are free software, released with a three-clause BSD license.

Apps are built with JavaScript, the standard language used for Web-based tools and services. They can interact with other Web services and Web content to create rich media experiences for users, and use HTML and CSS for rendering.

Our goal is to provide our users with easy access to quality content and services to improve the experience of downloading and sharing content. This is our first step (of many to come) of our journey into the world of apps – stay tuned. We continue to be excited by the potential and look forward to your feedback!

-Simon-

Introducing µTorrent Server for Linux

by bnishi on September 2, 2010 in Announcements with 18 Comments
If any group has embraced the possibilities and power of BitTorrent for distribution, it is the Linux community. Virtually every distribution is available via torrent download and many even ship with a BitTorrent client in the default configuration. While the BitTorrent Python code has always been available for Linux users and uTorrent runs very well for many with Wine, a resounding number of BitTorrent fans have asked for a native µTorrent for Linux. When we started our Idea Banka few months ago, a Linux version was immediately the most requested feature, and has stayed #1 ever since.  We’ve heard you loud and clear, and today, we’ve taken a notable first step toward making it a reality.

µTorrent Server for Linux

This morning, we are announcing a preview release of the first of two new products for Linux users. µTorrent Server, an alpha version available immediately for download here, is intended for users seeking a fast, powerful and lightweight BitTorrent client without the need of the full features and complexity of the native GUI.  The server is a daemonizable 32-bit binary of the µTorrent core, built for x86 compatible Linux. It can be managed programmatically via an HTTP API or interactively by using the (included) customized version of the popular uTorrent Web user interface. µTorrent Server is a native Linux build from the same codebase as our very latest clients, featuring µTP support and all of the protocol improvements and extensions µTorrent users expect.

Today, we are distributing this as an archive to users who know their way around Linux and can help us test it and improve it before a wider release as a package for specific distros. If you are comfortable with extracting tar archives, running programs from the command line, and manually configuring a settings file then we invite you to download and try the alpha.

 

Today’s version is only the first step, and we will continue to support the Linux user community with new versions in the near future. If you prefer to stick to more conventional user experience, rest assured we are working hard to build a full-featured client, coming soon. µTorrent Linux will offer the same clean and full featured UI that millions of users of of µTorrent on Windows have enjoyed.  We are hoping to get this out to you for testing in a few months. Stay tuned!

 

In the meantime, we look forward to hearing what you think of µTorrent Server – please join us in our forums and continue to help shape the future of µTorrent through the Idea Bank, or share your thoughts below.



- Brett –