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.
Boxee Wants to Enlist TV Pirates to Grow Hulu’s Audience
Forget filters, DRM and locked-down set-top boxes. The makers of the open-source media center Boxee have a novel approach aimed at getting people to watch TV from legitimate sources. The idea behind it is not to punish pirates, but to instead use them as taste makers that could drive others to Hulu, Joost and similar streaming media web sites.
I sat down with Boxee’s head of products, Dave Mathews, at the DCIA’s P2P and Video conference a few days ago. Boxee has been enjoying a busy month, issuing a major announcement almost every week. First it was unveiled that Boxee is now running on the Apple TV platform. Then Hulu came to Boxee, and most recently, the Boxee team won the CES i-stage competition, earning not only $50,000 but a booth at the next CES in Las Vegas. Boxee won the award, in part, because of its social features, which could help turn potential pirates into Hulu users.
Licensed P2P to Rise, But Piracy Will Dominate
Despite numerous examples of legitimate uses, most people still associate P2P with illegal file-sharing. That perception might be due for a change, according to a new report from research firm MultiMedia Intelligence. It predicts that licensed P2P transfers will grow 10 times faster than P2P piracy over the next five years.
Granted, forecasts like these should always be taken with a grain of salt, especially since at least part of the online video space appears to be moving away from P2P right now, with Joost a prominent example of abandoning peer-supported streaming for traditional Flash streams. And one shouldn’t disregard the huge amount of data transferred for less than legal purposes just yet.
Leaked Pilots Help Predict Fall Season Cancellations
If only Fox had listened to us. Back in June, we looked at the popularity of leaked TV show pilots to get a sense of what we have to expect this fall season. One of the shows we wrote about was Do Not Disturb, a sitcom about a hotel in New York that was directed by Jason Bateman. File sharers responded to the leaked pilot with the verdict “early cancellation.” And guess what? Do Not Disturb was canceled after only three episodes as the first show of the fall season.
Do Not Disturb wasn’t the only show that saw its pilot leak early. It’s safe to assume that at least some of these leaks were intentional, and they’ve shown to be pretty good indicators of the popularity of a show once it reaches the airwaves. Of course, online hits don’t always get great ratings on TV and vice versa. Episodes of Arrested Development are still doing pretty well on torrent sites, and it probably wasn’t just the DVD sales that compelled Fox to give Family Guy another chance. So how are this falls hits and misses doing on file sharing networks?
Biggest P2P Numbers Ever Show Futility of Windowing
“The biggest disappointment of the night”: Entertainment Weekly had some harsh words for this week’s installment of Heroes. The second episode of the show’s new season only clocked about 6 million viewers, following a season premiere that was down almost 30 percent. But Heroes seems to be doing just fine in the rest of the world. TorrentFreak is reporting that Heroes broke download records on many torrent sites.
Most of these downloads go to users outside of the U.S. who have to wait for weeks, if not months, after the U.S. premiere to finally see new episodes on TV. These delays do not just lead to millions of torrent downloads, but also a huge number of streams and downloads from less than legit YouTube clones and one-click hosters. In the light of recent download records, TV studios are slowly waking up to the fact that global release windows just don’t work anymore.
P2P Is Coming To YouTube
It looks like the idea of a P2P-powered YouTube is finally becoming reality, albeit without any contribution from Google. Singapore Shanghai-based P2P start-up PPLive, which we previously covered for its hugely successful P2P video platform, is experimenting with a P2P accelerator for Flash video streams. The application, which is dubbed PPVA, essentially distributes the stream of any popular Flash video from sites like YouTube via P2P without any involvement of the hosting server.
PPLive began a Chinese-language only beta test of PPVA in June, and says it already clocked more than 10 million downloads, with the maximum number of simultaneous users being as high as 500,000. We tested PPVA with some popular YouTube videos, and the results are intriguing — especially if you consider what this could mean for online video hosters and content delivery networks alike.
Details Emerge on NextshareTV P2P Box
The European P2P Next consortium will unveil a set-top box prototype that allows P2P streaming at the IBC conference in Amsterdam tomorrow. The device goes by the name of NextshareTV and has been developed at the Pioneer Digital Design Centre in London. NextshareTV makes use of some of the open-source P2P streaming technology of the Swarm Player, which was introduced by the P2P Next project just two months ago.
The idea of bringing P2P to set top boxes isn’t entirely new. Vudu is using progressive P2P downloads to deliver content to its boxes, and the Chinese P2P operator Vatata recently announced that its distributed streaming video service will be available on set-top boxes as well. NextshareTV one-ups these platforms by offering social elements, allowing its users tag and share content.
Joost to Kill Desktop Client
Exclusive: In what is likely to be a major shift in the company strategy, peer-to-peer start-up, Joost is going to stop making its desktop client. The decision to suspend the client is likely to be announced soon, I am told. The company is going to a browser-only strategy where much of its content is going to be available through a browser-based player. Read the full story on GigaOM.
Adware on Pirated Movie Sites Raises Legal Questions
Washington-based adware vendor Zango has been in the spotlight in recent days for cooperating with web sites that serve pirated movies and TV shows online. There have been calls to sue Zango — but such a step could open a can of worms.
The whole story all started with a post on the FaceTime Security Labs Blog last week about Movietvonline.com, which forces Windows-using visitors to install Zango’s adware application in order to access a catalog of bootlegged video streams and downloads. FaceTime followed up with reports about several other sites doing the same thing; install Zango, get access to Hollywood blockbusters and TV show episodes.
Security researcher Ben Edelman told Computerworld earlier this week that he believes Zango is violating the DMCA by cooperating with sites like Movietvonline.com and that Hollywood would win a court case against Zango. “I think this would be a pretty good one to pursue, because Zango is profiting directly from the infringement,” he added. While the idea of Hollywood suing an adware company sounds enticing, is the case really that clear-cut? And what kind of implications could a successful Hollywood lawsuit have for other advertisers in the online video space?
Father of the Internet: P2P Hogging Too Much Traffic
P2P is inefficient, unfair, and hogging our bandwidth, according to Lawrence Roberts, founder of Anagran and one of the chief architects of the foundations of the Internet.
Roberts gave a talk at our Structure 08 conference Wednesday, and said that P2P sharing takes up 80 percent of Internet traffic. Roberts’ numbers are nearly double the amount of bandwidth that Sandvine reported earlier this week. It should be noted that both Sandvine and Anagran develop technologies that manage bandwidth.
Roberts’ solution is to let the computing clouds deliver video bandwidth. You can watch his full presentation through the magic of on-demand video right here:
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