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.”

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.”

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.

Here is our pres standing shoulder to shoulder with some of Hollywood’s heavyweights at the Tribeca Film Festival in May. Steven Soderbergh, Todd Wagner, Jane Rosenthal (who co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival along with Robert DeNiro), Dean Garfield of the MPAA and Georg Szalai of The Hollywood Reporter. As much as I would like to say that right after this cordial photo was taken an outright brawl ensued in the green room between opposing parties… no such luck drama. No fisticuffs were had that night… only a healthy, lively discussion about the state of digital video distribution and how it’s shaking up the tried-and-true Hollywood release windows. If I can get my way, these folks will be back at the same table at Tribeca 2007 looking back on a watershed year for distribution of video on the Internet. Whether we make it out unscathed next time is a whole other issue.

When I was in Cannes in May for the Film Festival, Vivienne Chow from the South China Morning Post did a piece on BT’s plans for China as well as a podcast:

BitTorrent plans legal Chinese film service

Vivienne Chow talks with Ashwin Navin of BitTorrent, who discusses the company’s plans for the popular file-sharing technology in China.

(podcast)
(article)