BitTorrent Funding Reduced to Bits?
In a letter to shareholders, BitTorrent has announced that the $17 million in venture funding the company raised back in September has been greatly reduced, according to a report in TechCrunch. Evidently DAG Ventures, which led that latest round, was unhappy with what it was seeing. From that letter:
In late May and June of this past summer we closed a $17 million Series C financing. The lead investor in this financing was DAG Ventures. Given the changes in our Company’s business model and projections that occurred in close proximity to the Series C financing, DAG claimed that the Series C financing should be substantially renegotiated. After evaluating DAG’s claim, engaging in significant negotiations with DAG, unsuccessfully trying to raise funds from other sources, and taking into account the overall economy, the Company decided to work with DAG to significantly modify the terms of the Series C financing.
The $17 million has been ratcheted back to $7 million and the pre-money valuation of the company was reduced to $28 million. This new figure would put the total amount of funding BitTorrent raised at $36.4 million.
I guess this is the icing on the bad news cake BitTorrent’s been eating all year, but it’s been particularly bad as 2008 closes out. In August, the company laid off 12 people (roughly 20 percent of its staff at the time). Then in November, Ahswin Navin, BitTorrent Inc.’s president and co-founder, left to form an incubator-like startup with Steve Chen of YouTube. A day after he quit, BitTorrent laid off another 18 people and dropped CEO Doug Walker (who was there for a little over a year). Then, on Nov. 17, the company shut down its Torrent Entertainment Network.
StatShot: Heroes Tops Twitter
We’re adding a new data point to the StatShot this week. Trendrr will be providing a weekly snapshot of the most Twittered broadcast TV shows.
Trendrr is an online service that tracks and graphs consumption trends across social networks, blogs, torrents, Amazon, Craigslist, Twitter, Google News and dozens of video sites. Trendrr is a white list partner with Twitter, which gives the company access to the full public timeline via an open API.
Heroes had the most Tweets Dec. 4 – 10 (perhaps because everyone in the audience is prescribing ways to fix the ailing show). CSI and 30 Rock enjoyed nice bumps on the day after their broadcast, while Gossip Girl shot up above all but Heroes after its broadcast night.
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Q&A: BitTorrent’s Simon Morris
Whither BitTorrent? The company is picking itself up and putting itself back together after recent exec departures and layoffs. And it has finally shed its consumer business, the download store that had helped kicked off Hollywood’s last few years of digital dealmaking, but never did much after that.
We just got off the phone with BitTorrent VP of Marketing Simon Morris, who filled us in on the company’s changing strategy, as well as the recent hubbub about it moving away from a TCP-based P2P protocol to one that would interfere with VoIP and other activity. Morris said that following the company’s multiple rounds of layoffs, BitTorrent is now “in safe shape” to move forward. A lightly edited transcript follows.
NewTeeVee: So, I saw that the Torrent Entertainment Network is no longer up. When did that shut down?
Simon Morris: I think it was Nov. 17, a little over two weeks ago.
NewTeeVee: Was that due to lack of use?
Morris: It was due to two things. We found it very hard to make it a profitable business endeavor. If you look at the things we’re trying to do as we shrink down the company due to the economic environment, we’re experts in content delivery over the internet. With the Torrent Entertainment Network we were stepping into a new domain of merchandising of consumer entertainment products. In many ways, the retrenchment of the company has been really focusing on what we’re good at.
Mac Version of uTorrent Released
The popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent, is now available for Macs. TorrentFreak writes that the long-awaited Mac version only runs on Leopard/Intel Macs right now and is in beta.
UTorrent for Windows has been around since September of 2005. BitTorrent Inc. acquired uTorrent in 2006, and roughly two years ago work on a Mac version began. An alpha version of the Mac client leaked on to the public earlier this year, but this version has significant improvements.
A BitTorrent Inc. rep told TorrentFreak that the company is now working to fix bugs with the PowerPC as well getting uTorrent to run on the Tiger OS.
The new Mac uTorrent can be downloaded here.
StatShot: BitTorrent Loves Batman
The Dark Knight continues to cast its vengeful shadow over BitTorrent, according to TorrentFreak, staying on as the most popular pirated movie. Other than that — there was only one new addition to the top 10 list: Elegy, a smaller film starring Ben Kingsley that came out earlier this year.
| Rank | Last Week | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | The Dark Knight |
| 2 | 3 | Tropic Thunder |
| 3 | 2 | Traitor |
| 4 | 6 | Max Payne |
| 5 | 4 | WALL-E |
| 6 | … | Elegy |
| 7 | 5 | Step Brothers |
| 8 | 9 | Taken |
| 9 | 8 | The Chronicles of Narnia: Price Caspian |
| 10 | 10 | Burn After Reading |
Statshot: Dark Knight Rules (BitTorrent)
According to TorrentFreak, The Dark Knight was the most pirated movie of 2008. Ummm, hooray? Somehow I doubt Warner Bros. will include that stat on the DVD packaging. The movie’s been on and off the list of top BitTorrented films throughout the summer as people took video camera footage of the film in theaters or ripped it from screeners.
| Rank | Last Week | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | (new) | The Dark Knight |
| 2 | 1 | Traitor |
| 3 | 4 | Tropic Thunder |
| 4 | 2 | WALL-E |
| 5 | 3 | Step Brothers |
| 6 | (new) | Max Payne |
| 7 | 9 | The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor |
| 8 | 6 | The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian |
| 9 | 5 | Taken |
| 10 | 8 | Burn After Reading |
Over at TV by the Numbers‘ breakdown of the most DVRed broadcast TV shows, McDreamy and crew still dominate the list with 4.089 million viewers via DVRs for the week of Oct. 17-Nov. 2. As TVbtN points out, Obama’s infomercial ran during this week but does not appear on this list because of missing data.
P2P & the Economic Downturn: Hello, Browser Toolbars!
Commercial P2P, we hardly knew ye: The recent shake-up at BitTorrent Inc., which consisted of replacing its CEO, losing its president and firing half of its workforce, has fueled speculation that P2P as a B2C business model is dead. Paul Glazowski mused the other day that, “[T]he legit, utopian vision of paid-for P2P downloads is headed for a depression,” while the typically upbeat P2P news site Slyck.com contended that “things could get dicey” for BitTorrent and other, similar startups.
Actually, things already have, at least in terms of the number of people that have been laid off. BitTorrent went to 18 employees from 55 in just four months, and Vuze recently confirmed two rounds of cuts totaling 24 people. P2P advertising startup Skyrider closed shop completely in October, and file-sharing dinosaur Morpheus quietly faded away earlier this year. Still, there is hope on the horizon for P2P startups — if they’re willing to annoy their user base, that is.
BitTorrent Makes Additional Cuts
Updated. BitTorrent, after losing its president and co-founder Ashwin Navin, has laid off more of its staff.
We don’t know the extent of the cuts or whom they affect, but we do know they include Lily Lin, the company’s director of communications. Lin confirmed to us that she had been let go but has not replied to an email seeking additional details, which we suppose is her prerogative since she doesn’t work there anymore.
Update: The cuts apply to 18 people, or about half of BitTorrent’s staff, according to the New York Times Bits blog. Bits also reports the company plans to focus its remaining efforts on its BitTorrent DNA content accelerator rather than its consumer-facing video store.
Update 2: BitTorrent also appears to have dropped CEO Doug Walker. The company issued a press release today saying that CTO Eric Klinker had been instated as the new CEO. It did not make mention of the layoffs.
BitTorrent laid off about 20 percent of its staff in August. Since then, it raised $17 million, according to a regulatory filing, bringing its total funding over the last four years to $46.4 million.
BitTorrent President Quits, Forms New Venture With YouTube’s Chen, Others
BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin is leaving his post as president of the company to form an incubator-like endeavor with a group of other tech executives that includes YouTube co-founder Steve Chen. Navin announced the news via email and said he would remain with BitTorrent in a new role as board director.
Navin was the guy who originally convinced Bram Cohen to turn his widely used BitTorrent technology into a business four years ago. Up till recently, he has been the key spokesperson for the company. We had heard rumors of Navin’s departure for months but he repeatedly denied them.
Meanwhile, it’s been a tumultuous time for BitTorrent as the company has struggled to find traction. It has shifted strategic directions more than once, going from torrent search engine to consumer store to B2B delivery to embedding its software into devices like routers to its latest move into video game delivery.
StatShot: McDreamy, Tropic Thunder, Obama
We’ve got a new set of numbers for the StatShot family starting today. In addition to TorrentFreak’s Most BitTorrented movies and the Video Breakout’s Cool 100, our good friends at TVbytheNumbers will be sharing with us the top DVR’d programs each week.
And what better way to induct the stats into the family than with a lot of drama. Six dramas, actually, as Grey’s Anatomy had the largest time-shifted audience for last week, followed by House, CSI and a host of other heavy shows. For a little levity, The Office had the biggest increase in DVR vieiwing. Check out the full top 20.
Hollywood spoof Tropic Thunder stormed to the top of TorrentFreak’s list of the most BitTorrented movies last week, bringing with it some other newcomers, including WALL-E and the colon-heavy trio of The Chronic(what!)cles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the TV movie Futurama: Bender’s Game.
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