Written by Chris Albrecht
Posted Tuesday, October 9, 2007 at 10:16 AM PT

BitTorrent Moves into B2B with DNA

In a significant move that could usher in faster and cheaper streaming video delivery, online video startup BitTorrent today made available a product it’s calling BitTorrent Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA). The service, which is being offered to commercial content publishers, builds on BitTorrent’s popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol to aid video streaming and downloads. This marks a change for BitTorrent, which had previously tried to capitalize on the technology by launching a consumer download service.

“This is a serious disruptor to services like Akamai,” Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent’s president, told us this morning. “BitTorrent improves user experiences for streaming by peer-accelerating those transfers.”

BitTorrent has already signed one client: Brightcove, which will implement the technology as part of its new high-quality Internet TV initiative, called Brightcove Show.

Content publishers can implement DNA through a line of JavaScript that detects whether or not the user has the BitTorrent client. If the user does, BitTorrent kicks in, if not, it will revert back to the publisher’s default content delivery network (CDN).

BitTorrent has been working on the product for a long time, but launched now because “video is not a great business when you look at cost and revenue opportunity,” according to Navin. “If you’re a top-tier salesforce, selling ads against a streaming video, you collect about 15 cents to 20 cents per view on a $40 CPM. The cost to support that video is substantially higher.” BitTorrent believes it can reduce those supporting costs drastically.

While this latest move reaches out to other businesses, Navin doesn’t see this as a radical change in strategy. “Technically, we’ve always been B2B,” said Navin. “We’ve been a tool for people to reach other people effectively.” And BitTorrent is not giving up on its consumer plays like the BitTorrent store, which offers a number of movies and TV shows for download. Navin said that side of the business continues to grow, as does installed client base.

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Topic: P2P, Startups

Comments (5)

Akamai owns Red Swoosh so I cant see it being a huge disruptor to them .

Matt_ — 11:45 AM on October 9, 2007 Reply
Math? $40 CPM = $0.04 per view

Mathguy — 12:10 PM on October 9, 2007 Reply
Red Swoosh? Is anyone using it? There are 150M BitTorrent clients out there…

WhoIs — 8:21 PM on October 9, 2007 Reply
From peer-to-peer to beer-to-beer

Rascal — 6:29 AM on October 11, 2007 Reply
i assume he means 4-5 inserts @ $40 CPM

mathguy — 11:15 PM on October 11, 2007 Reply

Linkbacks (7)

[...] Founded in 2004, BitTorrent has faced an uphill road as a company because of all the illicit things its popular variety of decentralized peer-to-peer file-sharing had been used to do. Since then, the startup has made some friends in the entertainment industry and launched its own online content storefront. However, we think it’s finally found its true calling as a network accelerator tool, with the recent public release of BitTorrent DNA. [...]

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