This is more than just a partnership: it’s a full-blown joint venture that will see a new company tackle P2P mobile payments and create a digital “community” for retailers and customers around the world. Read more »
BitTorrent wants more artists to give away stuff to file sharers – which is why they just gave those artists an option to also sell stuff to file sharers. Read more at paidContent »
Watch out, Ustream and Co: BitTorrent officially launched the open beta of its live streaming service at SXSW Tuesday morning. Read more »
Watch out, Yousendit: BitTorrent now offers person-to-person file sharing of files of up to 1 TB for free. The company’s new SoShare app specifically targets musicians, filmmakers and photographers. Read more »
New laws make downloading, as well as uploading, content illegally an offence punishable by a prison term and a large fine in Japan, in contrast with the emerging approach elsewhere. Read more at paidContent »
Peter Sunde, co-founder and former spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, doesn’t want to go to jail. In a plea for clemency filed this week, he argued that the case against him was full of irregularities. Sunde also shared a few more details about The Video Bay. Read more »
A new study from Google and the UK copyright collection society PRS for Music finds that live TV is the fastest-growing segment of copyright infringement — and a large presence on social networking sites. Read more at paidContent »
Crowdsourcing, crowd-financing and… file sharing lawsuits? The science fiction comedy Iron Sky has gotten lots of help from its fans, and its filmmakers have in the past relied on BitTorrent to distribute their works. Now, a German distributor is threatening to sue file sharers. Read more »
Silicon Valley veteran and former Formspring COO Ro Choy has been hired by BitTorrent Inc. as VP of Biz Dev and Marketing. One of his first tasks on the job: Dealing with rumors that the company is going to rebrand itself as Gyre Corp. Read more »
Your Facebook or LinkedIn account doesn’t have a phone number, but one day it might if Tyntec has anything to say about it. The German company wants to build a virtual mobile phone into any Web 2.0 service, bridging the gap between over-the-top apps and mobile. Read more »
A new Facebook app called Pipe will let users transfer large files to their friends, through a peer-to-peer service that makes novel use of Adobe’s AIR technology Read more »
“Our industries do something that no one else can do,” the Motion Picture Association of America’s Fritz Attaway said at the Association of… Read more at paidContent »
BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen demonstrated his P2P live sreaming protocol at the SF MusicTech Summit on Monday, arguing that it would be much better suited to stream large sports events that existing CDN-based solutions. “My goal here is to kill off television,” he joked. Read more »
China’s online video service PPTV struck a strategic partnership deal with local cable TV provider WASU last week that could hold the key to finally bring online video to the living room in China. Android TVs and set-top boxes could also play a big role. Read more »
Netflix dominates the business of streaming movies and television into consumers’ homes, but a new business model developed by big data firm Opera Solutions could help give cable companies the inside track. The model is combination of peer-to-peer networking via set-top boxes and big data algortihms. Read more »
BitTorrent’s new Share app offers users a way to privately share files of unlimited file size with others without paying for a cloud storage service. The company is currently using S3 to cache files, but wants to eventually move to its own P2P cloud service. Read more »
While cable operators and networks continue to downplay the effect of cord cutting, in Deloitte’s State of the Media Democracy survey, the firm reports that 9 percent of respondents have already canceled their cable subscriptions, with another 11 percent saying they are considering doing so. Read more »
KaZaA, Napster, LimeWire & Co. all have been sued out of existence in the U.S., but Spain’s Blubster and Piolet music swapping apps prevailed in court today. Pablo Soto, who developed both file sharing applications, can’t be held liable for copyright infringement, a local court found. Read more »
London startup Transferwise wants to be the Skype of currency exchange, disrupting existing services that charge customers heavily for moving their money. But can its low-cost, peer-to-peer approach really succeed? Read more »
This week’s talk about usage-based billing has been a bit of a deja vu for BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker, who thinks the solution isn’t to charge or slow down customers. Instead, he believes smart technology can solve our problems and save the Internet in the process. Read more »
Consumers in Europe may be feeling the smarting bite of the economic winter settling in around us, but when it comes to internet and mobile… Read more at paidContent »
Belgian music rights holders want local ISPs to pay 3.4 percent of their subscriber revenue to compensate for music piracy committed by their customers. Those customers, however, could still be sued for file sharing, even after their ISPs paid for it. Read more »
How do you convince people that the future of music is all about access, and not ownership? LimeWire thought it had a solution to this problem with its never-launched Grapevine music subscription service. What did Grapevine have to offer? Take a look for yourself. Read more »
BitTorrent Inc. is starting to stream a live DJ set out of its office every Friday afternoon to stress-test its new live streaming platform. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen and his team have been developing the live streaming platform for close to three years. Read more »
Perhaps Netflix has found a friend in its lonely battle against broadband caps, as a U.K. paper is reporting that gamers playing the OnLive service can use up to 20 GB in six hours. Can an outraged gaming community help eliminate broadband caps? Read more »
µTorrent users will soon be able to transcode their downloads and sync them with mobile and connected devices, thanks to a new µTorrent Plus client now going into limited alpha testing. Want to check it out yourself? We have some invite codes inside. Read more »
BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen and his company are moving forward with its P2P live streaming project, expanding field trials and courting indie bands to stress test Cohen’s algorithms. However, it could still take months before BitTorrent Live is ready for prime time. Read more »
Broadband geeks don’t have to look to the stars any longer to guess how much of Europe’s bandwidth is generated by BitTorrent and how SIP is faring against Skype on the continent. Ipoque’s new Internet Observatory offers real-time traffic data for these and other trends. Read more »
It’s been close to a year since LimeWire was forced to shut down its file sharing platform. LimeWire’s website has since been reduced to a single splash page – but it’s still attracting more than a million people a month looking for free music every month. Read more »
Peer-to-peer networks in general and BitTorrent in particular are more expensive per bit for companies and business that provide networks rather than the larger ISPs according to a recent study that looks at file sharers usage patterns and ISPs peering agreements to understand costs. Read more »
Collaborative consumption refers to a class of new businesses that use the web to enable the sharing and bartering of goods and services — from cars to apartments to office space. The market evolved out of the first generation of general-purpose P2P marketplaces such as Craigslist and eBay and is now tied to the way we use the Internet and cell phones. GigaOM Pro conducted a survey of GigaOM readers to gauge the popularity of the collaborative consumption movement, which services readers are using and the impact certain security concerns will have on the growth of industry. This research note examines the survey’s results and provides analysis on the current state and future of the web-sharing market. Companies mentioned in this report include Zipcar, RelayRides, thredUP and Airbnb. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free GigaOM Pro trial subscription. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Skillshare is riding the P2P wave and has built a platform for users to offer real-world classes of any kind to interested students. It is expanding to San Francisco and Philadelphia later this month and is closing its Series A round soon. Read more »
File sharers can download a spy thriller with a cast including Six Feet Under actor James Cromwell this Friday, thanks to a collaboration between the film makers and P2P distribution platform VODO. The site is asking for donations to bring the movie to theaters. Read more »
Have you ever watched a TV show episode or Hollywood blockbuster on a website that didn’t have the proper licenses? Then you could be in trouble, at least if the example of Kino.to catches on. Rights holders are threatening to sue users of the now-defunct site. Read more »
Movies often show up on torrent sites as soon as they see the day of light. In the case of the new horror flick The Tunnel, this was done on purpose: The film makers are using BitTorrent as a way to raise money and awareness. Read more »
BitTorrent’s new Project Chrysalis client now makes it possible to share files of unlimited size with your friends even when you’re not online. The company is caching files and using a revamped UI to make the facilitation of BitTorrent downloads much easier than before. Read more »
TaskRabbit has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Shasta Ventures. The three-year-old startup, which currently brokers tasks in San Francisco and Boston, will use the money to expand its reach to other metro areas nationwide. Read more »
Gone are the days when P2P was more or less synonymous with file sharing. Now you can offer up just about anything you can think of for sale, rent or trade directly to interested individuals. But P2P will also reshape how business operates inside and out. Read more »
New laws to track and disconnect Britons accused of illegally downloading copyrighted files has been controversial, but after an attempt to get it overturned by the U.K.’s two largest Internet providers failed, it looks certain to be put into action. Read more »
Akamai could begin leveraging P2P technology to stream live or on-demand videos. While it has been experimenting off and on with P2P ever since its acquisition of Red Swoosh in 2007, the introduction of video streaming through its NetSession client-side technology might be close to release. Read more »
