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Azureus Vuze, BitTorrent Losing to Market Leader uTorrent
uTorrent now commands 60 percent market share among BitTorrent clients that are available to file sharers, according to the latest numbers released this week by the Tribler P2P team at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
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That’s bad news for Azureus Vuze, which had been gaining, and the official client from BitTorrent — both of which lost over 20 percent of their share since last month, with BitTorrent’s client on a losing streak since June. In the “winner takes most” world of the Web, these numbers put uTorrent in a commanding lead. However, Transmission is growing at a rapid clip, posting nearly a 24 percent gain over September.
The Tribler team simply counted the client application reported by peers connected to a number of torrent swarms. What’s not clear is how the location, time, or selected torrents might have affected results — for instance, if Tribler was connecting from Delft, the results may be skewed toward European users.
All of which leaves this Vuze user wondering if he shouldn’t switch to uTorrent. Vuze’s attempts to position Azureus as a media platform and not just a torrent download application just seems to get in the way of sharing files.
We Live in Public’s Split Distribution Disorder
One would be hard-pressed to find a more appropriate film than We Live in Public to illustrate how broken the independent feature film distribution market is. A rumination on the life and works of online video pioneer Josh Harris, the mad genius behind Pseudo and Operator11, the film explores issues of privacy, surveillance, fame and grandiosity as Harris works through a series of groundbreaking, expensive failures in art and technology. Everyone working in new media and online video today should see it. But unless you live in New York, you can’t — at least not yet.
While Harris was mashing up the downtown art scene and that of Silicon Alley techies in Manhattan before and after the turn of the century, The Real World changed the face of television to feature more — and cheaper — so-called “reality” fare and Michael Moore took independent feature documentaries mainstream. Since then, YouTube and Facebook have turned many of Harris’s predictions into the revenue-generating, over-sharing reality we know today. So you would think that a Grand Jury Prize winner from Sundance with a director who’s now earned that honor twice would have no trouble finding distribution on favorable terms. But the Park City festival clearly isn’t the ticket to big audiences and Indiewood riches it may have once been, if Director Ondi Timoner’s decision to market the release herself is any indication.
Lifetime’s Project Runway to Strut Online
Fans of Project Runway were happy to see the series continue, if on a new network, when the Lifetime network managed to wrangle the show away from Bravo. And now the network has announced that “ProRun” will be made available for free, with ads, online, something that was suggested — nay, demanded — right here over a year ago.
Like similar reality shows, including Top Chef, there’s so much product placement in Product Runway that the more people viewing it in any medium is simply more value for advertisers. But cable networks have been less willing than broadcast networks to put stuff online out of the fear it would endanger carriage fee revenue paid by cable and satellite television providers, though this is not the first show Lifetime is offering in full episode form online. (Lifetime uses Brightcove for video, but disables embedding — still progress!)
Lusting After the Phantom Miro eX
Online video distribution is exciting, but it wouldn’t be of much interest if the cameras weren’t also getting smaller, cheaper and more powerful all the time. The latest object of desire I’ve stumbled across is the recently released Phantom Miro eX from Vision Research. While the RED One camera offers incredible resolution, the Miro offers incredible shutter speeds — essential for high-speed photography. Think bullets destroying apples, super-duper-slo-mo slam dunks, and all sorts of visual trickery used in commercial productions.
Yes, it’s a niche interest device that will probably only appeal to cinematographers working at a fairly high level (Vision’s cameras have been used for everything from the Super Bowl to Battlestar Galactica). But similar to computer processors, video processors like the CMOS chips used in the Phantom have a way of getting smaller, faster and cheaper at an incredible rate.
Hulu Changes Privacy Policy to Make Comments More Civil
If you leave a comment or review on Hulu, your full name as you entered it during the site’s registration process will now appear instead of your username.
Hulu, which updated the legalese on its privacy and terms of use pages a month ago, is warning new users of the policy, and will delete any comments you might have posted since the change took effect. So if you were snarking on a young Claire Danes in My So Called Life thinking you’d be anonymous, think again.
Testing The Pirate Bay’s Darknet, IPREDator
Swedish courts may have slapped an injunction on The Pirate Bay, but not only has the site stayed up and running but the team behind it is hard at work on the IPREDator virtual private network (VPN) service — and we managed to land an invite to the beta version. As a fan of proxies, VPNs and any other way to get around pesky access restrictions, I gave it a spin. The short answer? It’s easy to set up and use, though if you don’t live in Europe, it’s probably not worth the money for the level of performance.
But IPREDator also suggests two notable things about the future of file-sharing: One, that “darknets” of network traffic hidden behind proxies and encryption may well make unofficial distribution even easier and less risky for users; and two, that sites like The Pirate Bay, which stand accused of profiting from copyright infringement, might be able to subsidize their non-commercial distribution efforts by offering the tools to share files securely rather than selling ads alongside indexes of torrent files.
On2 Shareholders Demand More Money From Google
On2 Technologies shareholders have filed lawsuits in New York and Delaware in an attempt to block the company’s acquisition by Google. The plaintiffs complain that the company is worth more than the $106.5 million, or 60 cents a share, being offered. On2 develops video codecs that are widely used in Flash video, and owning the company would give Google backdoor savings on software licensing fees from companies such as Adobe and access to On2’s code, allowing engineers at the Googleplex to further optimize its encoding algorithms.
Shareholders have set up a web site, “Vote No To Google’s Current Offer for On2,” with those representing as much as 20 percent of the voting interest in the company having pledged to kill the deal. Google had hoped to close the deal by the end of this year.
Report Sends Mixed Signals on Online Video Ad Market
While representing only 1.6 percent of total online and television advertising spending, and 4.3 percent of the online ad spend total, the market for video ads over the Internet is growing and is not necessarily taking money away from other media channels, according to a report released yesterday by eMarketer.
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In the midst of a worldwide recession and an advertising decline — the broadcast upfront was down 20 percent this year — it may sound like great news. But for every dollar spent on TV, search and banner ads, less than 2 cents goes to online video ads.
The good news is that the market grew by 125 percent last year, but it will have to sustain 40 percent growth year over year to achieve the report’s projections of tripling its total share and doubling its online share by 2013, and then still be a bit player in the larger market.
The other bright spot is that for every hour of video viewed, online outlets outpaced television outlets with 17 cents in ad revenue compared with 13 cents. However, the cost of serving all the video that isn’t supported by ads significantly dilutes that 17 cents an hour. And both were down significantly from last year, a trend eMarketer predicts will continue.
Rajshri Media Reaches 100M Views on YouTube
With over 100 million total views, Mumbai-based Rajshri Media recently became the No. 1 most-viewed channel on YouTube in India, and the 63rd most-viewed channel worldwide. Music videos and children’s programming have proven especially popular since the channel was launched early last year. Rajshri is the online effort of Rajshri Productions, whose history in motion pictures dates all the way back to 1947. The web site, which was launched in 2006, features both archived television and film content as well as original content for the web.
The company has also created portals for video content in a number of South Asian languages, including Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali. It set up separate YouTube channels in the hope of topping the charts for those language groups as well. It’s also reaching out on Facebook and Orkut, according to an announcement from CEO Rajjat Barjatya.
But Rajshri’s ambitions, and those of other international content partners on YouTube, could end up cut short by business decisions made in San Bruno and Mountain View, Calif.
Torrents on Your iPhone? Yes! No! Maybe!
Drivetrain, an application for the Apple iPhone developed by Maza Digital, would have allowed users to remotely control the Transmission torrent client running on their home computer. I say “would have,” because it was rejected by the App Store. “This category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third-party rights,” the rejection email stated. “We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store.”
But in fact Apple has already chosen to publish that type of application to the App Store — namely Trackr, from Muzi Software. Neither application offers the ability to actually download content, infringing or otherwise, to an iPhone; both are simply remote access applications. And in a world of tethered devices and technology companies teaming up with content providers, you can probably expect to see more of these arbitrary decisions.
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© 2009 The GigaOM Network. Marketing consulting by ACS.
