P2P Blog

BitTorrent After The Pirate Bay: Do You Still Need Trackers?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:45:38 -0800

The Pirate Bay made headlines earlier this week with yet another dramatic announcement, this time that the notorious BitTorrent site�s tracker has been officially shut down. But the move won�t impact downloading, site admins explained on a blog. Trackers are no longer needed to facilitate BitTorrent transfers, the blog entry explained, because decentralized extensions of the P2P protocol are mature enough to pick up the tab. �It�s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date,� the blog proclaimed.

As always with announcements from the folks at The Pirate Bay, there�s a lot of self-serving smoke and mirrors, mixed with a good amount of hubris. However, the announcement does bring up an interesting question: Is BitTorrent really ready for a world without trackers? We talked to some of the major players to find out. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: bittorrent, dht, pex, tpbthepiratebay, newteevee

S4ve.as relaunches as pay as you go, 99 Cents per pop file hosting

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:29:59 -0800

One-click file hosting services S4ve.as relaunched with an interesting proposition this week: S4ve.as will host any file of up to 5GB for up to seven days for 99 Cents. Payments are facilitated through Amazon Payments.

S4ve.as originally launched with free 24 hour file hosting back in August, but temporarily had to shut down because the service got too popular too quickly. "Visits came in from 157 countries and within the first couple weeks of launch we were already seeing terabytes of data per day," Scott Barrow from S4ve.as maker Media Hog told me.

s4ve.as

Many other file hosting services have been facing similar issues in the past. Some have shut down completely, while others have been trying to sell subscription services to consumers willing to pay 10 or so bucks per month for an easy way to upload and share files.

So why did S4ve.as opt for 99 Cents per file instead? Again, Barrow: "We think there's a mass market proposition out there for an average user who has to send a large file to a colleague, friend, or family, but doesn't want to spend an arm and a leg and isn't ready to commit to some premium subscription."

He added that many casual users often need file hosting services in the eye of a crisis, and not as a permanent service. That does make sense to me, especially since I've actually been in that very situation myself. I had to send someone a 1GB video file, but the FTP upload wouldn't work. I ended up subscribing for a month to a file hoster, but I really didn't use the service much after that initial transmission.

s4ve.as upload

I actually just tried S4ve.as, and it's a pretty painless experience, especially if you have an Amazon.com account (which apparently 98 million of you do, according to Barrow.) You don't actually have to register with S4ve.as at all, so all you need to do is log into your Amazon account, click pay, and the upload starts automatically. Here's the download page for the file I uploaded.

I could see myself using this occasionally, but I'd be a little more hesitant than with a free service. Of course, that seems to be exactly the point of this offering. One has to wait and see whether these occasional use cases are enough to make S4ve.as a profitable business.

Tags: s4ve.as, filehosting, oneclickhosting, amazonpayments, scottbarrow

Upcoming Boxee Beta Puts TV Content Front and Center

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:51:24 -0800

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen stopped by our NewTeeVee Live conference last week to officially announce the first Boxee-branded hardware, a set-top box that will be available sometime next year. I interviewed Ronen after his keynote, and he gave me a few more details about both the box itself and the upcoming beta of Boxee�s software, which will be officially unveiled at an event in New York on Dec. 7th.

The upcoming beta is going to be much more media-centric and less application-focused than the current alpha version, which Ronen told me is largely to make it easier to find movies and TV content. Users will no longer have to remember who�s supplying Boxee with what kind of content, but will simply be able to browse a list of shows or search for specific titles. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: boxee, avnerronen, newteevee, newteeveelive

Net neutrality friends and foes squaring off, Oxford-style

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:24:44 -0800

Proponents and opponents of new net neutrality legislation squared off in New York yesterday as part of an Oxford-style debate organized by Tech-Debate.com. The participants included Tim Wu from Colombia Law School, AT&T SVP Robert Quinn and Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures.

What's an Oxford-style debate, you might ask? Here's a helpful explanation straight from the event's web site:

"This debate is not a panel discussion or a lecture. It is a contest, and at its conclusion there will be a winner. Before the event, the audience will vote whether they are for the motion, against the motion, or undecided. The audience will vote again at the conclusion of the debate. The side that has moved the most votes will be declared the winner."

Sounds like fun, right? Well, the event was actually really interesting, as evidenced by the video recording:

However, there's one caveat. The video ends before the votes are in. I asked the Tech Debate folks about it, and they promised to out an extended version up later tonight. Of course, I know you can't wait to find out who won. No worries, I got the official score:

tech debate

The motion, of course, was to pass net neutrality legislation, which means Wu and his crew won this one fair and square.

Tags: netneutrality, techdebate, timwu, robertquinn, bradburnham

P2P GUI: Remotely control all your transfers in one place

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:51:17 -0800

This one could be interesting for really obsessive P2P users: P2P GUI makes it possible to remotely control MLdonkey, aMule, rTorrent, Transmission and giFT all through one web interface.

p2p gui

It's based on an executable that starts up a web server on your system and then offers access to three different interface styles. Here's a list of some of its features, taken straight form the P2P GUI website:

"Highly configurable (CSS/JS/HTML/D). No installation needed: download & run. Settings are stored. SSL cryptography. HTTP basic authentification. Flexible api to cover most network features/designs. Preliminary account support. Download unfinished files for preview."

P2P-GUI is compatible with Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and can be downloaded from Sourceforge.

Tags: p2pgui, p2p-gui, rtorrent, transmission, gift, mldonkey, amule, webui

P2P Blog at Newteevee Live

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:56:01 -0800

I'm at Newteevee Live today, doing some live blogging for Newteevee.com, as well as the occasional interview for the live stream. Go check out the stream and the many posts that will go oup throughout the day, or stop by and say hello if you're there!

Tags: newteevee, newteeveelive, ntvl

TVTrigger Is Like iTunes for TV Torrenting

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:51:13 -0800

Remember how iTunes popularized podcasts? The same could soon happen to TV torrenting, thanks to a new BitTorrent application called TVTrigger. Windows-only TVTrigger is like an iTunes for your torrent downloads. It sits on your desktop, giving you access to a programming guide with a few thousand TV shows, complete with torrent links to download each one of them.

Sounds legally questionable? It probably is in the U.S., but that doesn�t bother TVTrigger�s Egypt-based makers, who claim that BitTorrent is legal in their country and they don�t have access to Hulu.com. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: tvtrigger, tvtorrents, bittorrent, torrents, newteevee

Limewire hires contextual ad veteran, doubles down on ad strategy

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:18:36 -0800

Limewire announced two new hires today: John Pavley is joining the company as VP of egineering and Shoshana Winter as VP of marketing. Winter is one of the co-founders of the pioneering social networking site Six Degrees, which in itself is pretty interesting, but the hire of Pavley should be a real eye opener. Here's a quick bio from the company's press release:

"Pavley comes to Lime Wire from Conductor, Inc., where as Chief Technology Officer, he led R&D, Development, Technical Operations, and IT for the company. Prior to Conductor, Inc., Pavley was Chief Technology Officer of ContextWeb, where he managed R&D, Development, Technical Operations, Q & A and IT with both local and offshore resources. He joined ContextWeb after a term as VP Business Systems Engineering for Yahoo! Search Marketing."

Oh yeah, and before that, he worked for Doubleclick. Just in case you're not familiar with all of those companies: Conductor is doing SEO management and optimization, Contextweb runs a contextual ad exchange and Yahoo Search Marketing is essentially Google Adsense in purple.

Limewire has been working on a contextual ad platform for its P2P client and its growing family of web sites for at least two years now. The ad platform is still in stealth mode, and part of it is actually developed by a separate corporate entity in California, but Pavley's hire certainly tells me that the company is taking these efforts very serious.

Tags: limewire, p2pads, advertising, JohnPavley, ShoshanaWinter

Garry Fung about Isohunt and Hexagon.cc

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 12:40:30 -0800

Networkworld has an interesting, albeit a little ill-formatted interview with Isohunt.com founder Garry Fung, who offers a few interesting details about his site. Isohunt is currently getting around 30 million visitors per month, according to Fung, and its MySQL index is a whopping 30 GB. That's a lot of torrent data right there.

Still, he's been able to run the whole site with merely 14 servers, which kind of validates a point I was trying to make a few months back: It doesn't take a lot of hardware or capital to distribute the world's information if you utilize P2P. I'd love to be able to compare this with the number of servers it takes to run Hulu ...

Fung also has some thoughts to share on why he believes copyright owners should and eventually will work with torrent sites, including an interesting tidbit:

"The MPAA is suing us, but one of their members is working with us just like a normal copyright owner should."

Any guesses who this might be?

Tags: isohunt, isohunt.com, hexagon.cc

VODO Embraces BitTorrent to Distribute Movies, Compensate Filmmakers

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 16:41:11 -0800

UK-based P2P video platform VODO published its second feature film on dozens of file-sharing sites Thursday, hoping that worldwide exposure will bring in donations, subscriptions and traditional distribution deals. David Miller�s documentary In Guantanamo, which is the result of a press tour of the controversial detention facility, has been downloaded around 15,000 times within the first 24 hours, according toVODO founder Jamie King.

The site�s first feature, Us Now, got downloaded around 250,000 times since its release in mid-October. Part of the volume is due to VODO�s relationships with a number of well-known BitTorrrent sites, with Isohunt and The Pirate Bay currently featuring In Guantanamo on their front pages. VODO hasn�t been quite as successful in making money from these downloads, but King hopes that a combination of one-off donations and a subscription level for documentary geeks and movie buffs will help eventually make the site sustainable and provide an additional revenue stream for filmmakers. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: vodo, jamieking, stealthisfil, newteevee