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5 Things to Know About The Pirate Bay Sale
The sale of The Pirate Bay to a Swedish software company, which plans to revamp the site and launch a new business model to compensate rights holders, has most everyone in the P2P community scratching their heads today. Global Gaming Factory X announced that it will buy the site for roughly $8 million, along with Swedish P2P solutions provider Peerialism, which has been developing BitTorrent-based distribution solutions for P2P streaming and downloads. The plan is apparently to use Peerialism’s technology for the next generation of The Pirate Bay.
Countless file-sharing users are now asking: Where does this leave us? Some are wondering if it will lead to the BitTorrent meltdown that we’ve been hearing so much about in the wake of the Pirate Bay lawsuit. And what will happen to all that money?
Joost Adds Widgets, Metadata API to Its Flash Player
Joost has announced that it is going to allow third-party developers to add Flash widgets to its video player soon. The Joost Labs blog this week previewed a widget that adds keyword-based Twitter search results to a video. Joost wants to eventually release a widget API that will expose some of the underlying video’s metadata and make it possible to integrate these widgets within the Joost Flash player.
This isn’t the first time Joost is toying with widgets. The company’s P2P-based video application also featured a widget API, but few wanted to develop for a player that had no user base. However, Joost has clearly been thinking about how to make widgets work in the past few years, and some of these ideas could lead to interesting results.
Free Movie Downloads From 5 Filmmakers Who Learned to Love BitTorrent
The war on piracy can be a scary thing, especially if you’re a creative caught between the front lines. Hollywood would love to rid the world of file-sharing. Your audience, on the other hand, seems to consist mostly of pirates that download movies for free, watch unauthorized clips on YouTube and subscribe to Netflix just to make use of their DVD burner.
So how do filmmakers react? Well, some of them have started to embrace piracy and published their own works on sites like The Pirate Bay. Their motivations vary: Some just want to give back to their fans, others don’t like the studio system, and some never would have gotten distribution in the first place. The result, however, is always the same: free movies! For details and download links, read on.
The Pirate Bay Launches Ipredator VPN
It’s betarrrr: The guys behind The Pirate Bay have officially announced the beta test of their virtual private network (VPN), dubbed Ipredator, which makes it possible to use BitTorrent anonymously. All traffic will be encrypted as well, so your ISP won’t be able to snoop on your packets.
Ipredator costs 5 euros ($7) per month, and will initially only be open to 3,000 lucky beta testers. Another 180,000 potential users have signed up for invites, however, and The Pirate Bay team has promised to let all of them in within a month. That’s a pretty lofty goal, however, and one has to wonder whether Ipredator will really be able to meet its users’ expectations.
BitTorrent’s Long Tail Alive and Well on Private Torrent Sites
Bollywood, wrestling, anime, B-movies, art-house cinema, Asian action flicks and porn, lots and lots of porn — whatever you’re into, there’s bound to be a private torrent tracker for it somewhere. These private BitTorrent communities often work by invitation only and try to stay under the radar of both rights holders and the downloading masses. But does this exclusive approach to online piracy really work?
That’s the question three French researchers are trying to answer. Sylvain Dejean, Thierry Penard and Raphaël Suire from the University of Rennes infiltrated 42 private torrent trackers to figure out what made them tick. The trio published the results of its work in a new study titled “Olson’s Paradox Revisited: An Empirical Analysis of File-sharing Behavior in P2P Communities,” and the paper is good news for long-tail proponents and file-sharing enthusiasts alike.
NTV Moneymaker: Produce Amazon’s Next Commercial
How’s this for a deal? Amazon.com is starting a public contest for its next TV commercial, and the two lucky winners will both get Amazon gift certificates for $10,000 each. The web retailer is soliciting 30-second video spots until July 17, after which both a jury and the general audience will crown one winner. Voting for the audience price will begin mid-August, and the final winners will be announced Sept. 21.
Granted, Amazon isn’t exactly the first company to crowdsource its TV or web video commercials. In fact, video contest site Vidopp.com regularly lists dozens of contests from major brands and online startups alike. Some offer pretty substantial cash prizes, while others promise anything from a backyard barbecue set to a month of free rent. However, Amazon doesn’t seem to go down the contest route just to save money by not hiring a professional production company. The company clearly wants you to go all out. Why else would it reference the Three Wolf Moon shirt?
Microsoft Builds CDN to Handle Massive Online Video Growth
Microsoft’s bandwidth needs have been growing anywhere from 30-100 percent per year, and the biggest growth factor is online video. That’s one of the interesting tidbits revealed keynote by Microsoft’s Jeffrey Cohen that Dan Rayburn pointed to this week. Two years ago, only 10 percent of all data delivered by Microsoft and its CDN partners was video, according to Cohen. Next year, Microsoft estimates it to be 55 percent.
Cohen shared these numbers with the audience of the CDN Summit 2009 last month. He also outlined the company’s work on building out its own Edge Computing Network (ECN) to deal with these increased bandwidth needs, explaining that Microsoft plans to deliver 60 percent of its data for all of the company’s services from its own Edge Network by next year.
How About a Last.fm for Movies?
Is it time for a Last.fm for TV shows and movies? That’s the question a new online video platform called Whiwa.net is raising. Whiwa is a video community based on scrobbling –- the act of automatically tracking your media consumption habits and sharing them with the world — that is at the core of Last.fm’s social and recommendation features.
Whiwa is run by two developers out of the Czech Republic. The duo told me they have a lot of plans for their platform, but at this point it’s clearly still very experimental. However, the idea behind it is certainly interesting, and it begs the question: Could a movie site like this eventually become as big as Last.fm? Or is video just too different of a beast than music?
First Clips and Screen Shots: G1 Gets Video Recording Through Android Update
Google has added video recording capabilities to the HTC G1 through an update of its Android operating system that was sent out wirelessly to T-Mobile customers this week. Android version 1.5, code-named Cupcake, also features video sharing via YouTube, email and MMS. Bruce Lidl did a great first write-up of the new features earlier this week, but we couldn’t resist giving Android’s video recording a shot as well.
First the facts. The G1 records 3gp videos encoded with the h.263 video codec. There are two recording modes: High-quality offers you a resolution of 352×288 and a 360 Kbps bit rate while the low-quality setting comes with a resolution of 176×144 and a bit rate of 192 Kbps. How does all of that look? Well, see for yourself.
PPLive Nabs New CEO From Microsoft
The Chinese P2P video vendor Synacast, better known under the name of its video platform PPLive, will announce next week the appointment of former Microsoft exec Vincent Tao as its new CEO. Tao joined Microsoft in 2005 via the acquisition of his mapping startup Geotango, which provided the technology for Virtual Earth. Since then, Tao has acted as senior director for Microsoft’s online services division.
PPLive is one of the largest P2P video-streaming platforms in China, with some 20-30 million active monthly users. Tao relocated from Seattle to Shangai, where PPLive is based, just a few days ago, and he told me on the phone that he’s excited about the Chinese market. “The opportunity there is unprecedented,” he explained. Read more of this story
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