GigaOM » Vuze

Fanhattan Takes Content Discovery to the Cloud

Ryan Lawler — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:03:50 +0000

Forget about apps. The real work in content discovery is happening in the cloud. But you’d never know it, as a new offering from Vuze uses cloud data to create the front-end video discovery service for a wide range of connected TV devices.

The new offering, called Fanhattan, works by wrapping aggregating vast stores of movie data in a 10-foot user interface that’s perfect for TV viewing. Vuze hopes to be able to embed that content discovery engine into connected devices like new HDTVs and Blu-ray players, simplifying the way users navigate and find the movies they want to watch, whether they be available for streaming through subscription services like Netflix, viewable on authenticated TV services like HBO Go or on-demand for purchase or rent from Amazon Video On Demand or Vudu.

Fanhattan is driven by data that Vuze acquired through its purchase of The Open Movie Database, a formerly independent user-generated store of movie and entertainment information. Vuze has done a good job of prettying that data up, combining pictures, movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes and trailers from sites like YouTube to make finding a movie through Fanhattan easy.

Vuze wants to make Fanhattan the go-to way for users to find content on connected devices, and to that end, it’s talking to consumer electronics manufacturers about making the service available either as an app or as the front-end browsing tool for any content or streaming services that might be available on their devices. The key to all this, however, is a cloud-based approach that takes the heavy lifting off the processor and enables Vuze to install a very thin client to power the service.

Vuze’s approach takes cues from Netflix and other video services moving to HTML5 and web services to create experiences for multiple devices without having to rewrite code for each one. By doing so, Vuze needs only to create a new application wrapper for Fanhattan to reach many different devices.

Fanhattan doesn’t have any buy-in yet from device makers, which means you shouldn’t expect to see it on connected devices until at least early 2011. Indeed, the first implementations the company is promising will be PC and Mac applications, which it believes it will be able to bundle with its Vuze software. Before that, Vuze also needs some partners in the content space, as it promises only to display content from distributors that it has struck deals with.

While Vuze has its work set out for it on the partner side, the cloud-based approach to content discovery is a smart move forward not just for finding content, but also to displaying it on connected devices.

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uTorrent and Vuze Enable Torrent Downloads On the Go

Janko Roettgers — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:00:08 +0000

Both BitTorrent Inc. and Vuze released significant updates to their clients this week that include features to remotely control the applications from devices like the iPad or smartphones. BitTorrent Inc. also included a new protocol dubbed uTP into its flagship uTorrent client that could help to avoid network congestion issues.

Remotely controlling your BitTorrent downloads through a browser on your office PC or a mobile device isn’t exactly new; both uTorrent and Vuze have previously offered such functionality or supported access to it through third-party plug-ins. However, the process has been cumbersome in the past, and the new upgrades should help to make this function much more accessible.

Vuze unveiled a functionality called “Vuze remote” earlier this week that makes it possible to pair a Vuze client with any PC or mobile device with a browser without having to know the IP address of the client’s host machine. Users simply enter an access code generated by their client on the site http://remote.vuze.com, and they’re greeted with a web interface that resembles the look and feel of the original client, or a mobile-optimized interface in case they’re accessing the page with a smartphone browser.

Vuze allows users to remotely administer torrent downloads, making it possible to start a download on your home PC from your laptop of mobile phone while on the go. Functionality to remotely access these downloaded files seems to be in the works, but has not yet been included into the current release.

Competing client maker BitTorrent Inc. launched a limited test for a similar, albeit even more ambitions feature a few days ago that goes by the code name of Project Falcon. uTorrent users with access to the Project Falcon beta can control their client through a web application available at http://falcon.utorrent.com that adds another layer of security to remote torrent downloads.

Each session is encrypted with a session key that is being generated on the fly based on a user’s mouse movements, making it impossible for BitTorrent Inc., or anyone else for that matter, to monitor what a user is downloading. BitTorrent VP of Marketing and Product Simon Morris told me yesterday that the architecture of Project Falcon is actually very similar to a remote access service like Webex GoToMeeting, with the content viewed through the web app being completely isolated from the server infrastructure.

Falcon is also eventually going to support direct access to downloaded files through the browser, and uTorrent will even extend streaming functionality to its remote access. This means that users will be able to download a video file to their home machine and then stream it to a machine in their office — a set-up particularly useful in situations where access to P2P protocols or applications is blocked.

BitTorrent Inc. also released a stable version of uTorrent 2.0 this week, which includes the company’s UDP-based uTP protocol. uTP aims to prevent network congestion by automatically slowing down transfers once signs of congestion appear, and previous tests have shown this to work much better than using TCP for BitTorrent transfers.

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Studies Say Web Video Usage Overstated, P2P Users Buy More DVDs

Liz Gannes — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:58:10 +0000

Two research reports have just been released that aim to dispel two commonly held media consumption assumptions: one, that online video usage is pervasive, and two, that P2P users steal all the content they consume.

First up, a $3.5 million study (we had previously reported on it here) that directly observed people’s daily media consumption habits found that people watch far more TV and far more online and mobile video than they say they do.

The study, conducted by Sequenth Partners and Ball State University and funded by Nielsen, confirmed Nielsen’s earlier finding that 99 percent of video consumption happens on a TV screen. It also looked at other types of video consumption such as displays in stores and GPS navigators.

One of the researchers attributed the differences between people’s stated behavior and their observed behavior to both how they don’t want to admit how much TV they actually watch and how they do want to associate themselves with “new and cool” video consumption via the web and mobile phones.

Another — much smaller, and corporate-sponsored — study found that P2P users buy a ton of offline content. Users of P2P software from Vuze, which commissioned the study by Frank Magid Associates, buy more movie tickets and DVDs and rent more movies that the general Internet population. The study did not look at online content purchases by P2P users, because Vuze said its users hate DRM and high digital prices, according to Ars Technica. Who knows, maybe they’re all just buying DVDs to rip and seed on BitTorrent? (Just kidding.)

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Vuze Looks For Money In Porn

Janko Roettgers — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:15:31 +0000

P2P video startup Vuze quietly launched an adult video download service called StudioHD earlier this year. StudioHD offers an unlimited number of HD porn video downloads for a monthly fee that are subsequently facilitated through Vuze’s BitTorrent client. The company told me that StudioHD is a template for other premium services it plans to launch.

A premium adult outlet seems to be logical step for a company like Vuze, given the popularity of porn on P2P networks, but it’s also another indicator of how difficult it is to monetize P2P. Vuze has raised a total of $32 million in funding. Plans to sell rentals of major TV networks didn’t work out, and Vuze was forced to lay off 24 people last year as well as move out of its costly downtown Palo Alto, Calif., office space. And while Vuze (aka Azureus) used to be the most popular BitTorrent client, it has lost steam to competitors like uTorrent.

StudioHD is advertised alongside the “Sexy” video section of the Vuze content platform, which can be accessed from within the Vuze client. Users that click on such an ad are asked to verify their age, after which StudioHD is available as a second content destination within Vuze. The service offers its users “unlimited” downloads from a catalog of a few hundred HD clips for around $25 per month. StudioHD can only be accessed on three computers at a time, but the content itself is not DRM-protected.

A company spokesperson told me that Vuze decided StudioHD was “the right first step in entering the market for premium channels” because its audience consists mostly of males ages 18-44, adding that Vuze is in discussions with additional content owners to offer sports, music and other premium channels.

Adult content has always been popular with P2P users, with some market researchers estimating that up to 60 percent of all P2P video downloads are porn. Vuze has been catering to this market for a while, with lots clips featuring bikini beauties and the occasional bare breast. StudioHD, on the other hand carries far more explicit content, with categories ranging from “Girl-Girl” to “Orgasm.” Vuze’s spokesperson was quick to point out that traditional cable and satellite TV vendors also include premium porn channels in their offerings.

Vuze previously tried to monetize DRM-protected download rentals from TV networks like the BBC and Showtime. The company has since switched to an ad-supported model and revamped its client to regain traction with traditional P2P users that frowned upon the idea of DRM-laden content store.

That strategy seemed to have worked: Vuze.com now attracts almost 11 million active users per month, as opposed to roughly 6 million a year ago, according to Quantcast. Vuze also makes a significant part of its revenue through a bundled tool bar. Premium channels like StudioHD, according to the Vuze spokesperson, are now seen as “one more tactical revenue line in the company’s portfolio going forward.”

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Vuze Brings Easy Video Conversion to Apple Devices, but at What Cost?

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:00:08 +0000

I admit, I am a reformed Azureus user. When I made the transition from Windows to Mac for my primary machine, one hang-up that came with me was my devotion to Azureus, a program which (as I was soon to discover) was fast becoming unnecessarily resource-heavy and bloated, especially compared to lightweight Mac alternatives like Transmission, and more recently, uTorrent. I abandoned Azureus long before it stopped being open source and become Vuze, that Frankenstein beast of a media download manager.

Because I care about you, I actually installed the newly released version of Vuze on my MacBook today, even though it was painful to do so, and my notebook’s fan started working overtime the moment I did. The reason? Vuze now offers a quick and easy way to get video content in to your iTunes library and onto your iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV without getting your hands dirty with complicated conversion software.

It worked like a charm with the Katy Perry fluff piece I downloaded (if I have to endure Vuze, I should get to have some fun at least, right?); the conversion process took very little time and the video was available in my iTunes library immediately afterward. Likewise with a “Fast and Furious” trailer downloaded for the purposes of testing HD conversion, but I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t maintain HD quality during the conversion, since the max resolution supported under iTunes devices is 720×432 for Apple TV.

I suppose it’s very handy if you’re looking to quickly get video onto your portable Apple device, and if you don’t mind finding and/or downloading the file in Vuze (I tried adding a previously downloaded .mkv file to my Vuze library, but could not). And it works very well if you want to convert HD content for playback on your PS3 or Xbox 360, but overall, I don’t think the bargain is worth the price of admission, especially if you’re an advanced enough user to convert your video using HandBrake or some other similar program.

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Vuze Moves to the Big Screen

Chris Albrecht — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:39:26 +0000

P2P video platform Vuze today announced that users can now watch content downloaded to their Mac or PC on mobile and TV screens. The Vuze software update supports viewing via iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, PS3, and Xbox 360.

In the latest version of Vuze, there is a “Devices” tab listing the various viewing options. Users drag and drop videos from their Vuze library to one of these destinations and the software will determine whether the file can play on the device selected, convert the file and make it available for playback. For iTunes users, the video will be pushed into the iTunes library, where it can be moved around to various Apple devices. For Xbox and PlayStation users, the content will be streamed to the game console from the computer.

Last year was a rough one for Vuze as the company went through two rounds of layoffs, losing half of its work force. In October, Vuze launched a revamped client that was aimed at both beginners and power users (read: pirates), and around that time switched from a paid download model to ad-supported content in an effort regain some of the losses it experienced as users moved to other BitTorrent clients.

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P2P & the Economic Downturn: Hello, Browser Toolbars!

Janko Roettgers — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:07:09 +0000

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.

During a downturn, it’s easy to blame every bad thing on the economy. Vuze told us two weeks ago that it had expected the economic environment was going to deteriorate when it started to lay off people in April. That sounds good, but of course it’s only half the story.

In Vuze’s case, the layoffs likely had just as much to do with the realization that selling downloads to P2P users simply doesn’t work. BitTorrent has apparently learned the same lesson, as it’s reportedly poised to shutter its unsuccessful download store. Yet Vuze remains committed to its content platform; the company now wants to monetize the distribution of free content through advertising deals. Ad-supported downloads, however, are an equally risky bet during a downturn. Media companies have been passing out pink slips like Halloween candy in recent weeks to prepare for lower ad rates.

The good news is that for for Vuze, BitTorrent and even Pando, advertising isn’t the only source of revenue. All three companies have started to bundle their clients with browser toolbars from companies like IAC’s Ask.com, a move that seems to be having a substantial effect on their bottom line already. Former BitTorrent President Ashwin Navin recently described BitTorrent’s toolbar deal as “lucrative,” and Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa told me that his company’s toolbar revenue is “significant.”

But exactly how lucrative are these deals? Valleywag in September unearthed an offer for $2.50 per install of the Microsoft toolbar. Industry averages are said to be slightly lower, but those installations can still add some serious cash to a company’s bottom line. Take DivX, for example. The company is distributing the Yahoo toolbar with its free DivX player, and it recently revealed in a regulatory filing with the SEC that in the first nine months of this year, the deal generated more than $14 million — or 21 percent of its total revenue.

Of course, bundled software isn’t exactly a new phenomenon in the P2P space. File-sharing applications like Kazaa and Grokster regularly came with numerous toolbars, widgets and other adware applications. To be fair, today’s P2P startups generally use more respected affiliate partners whose toolbars are not functioning as adware, but simply try to direct users towards a certain search engine.

The companies also let users opt out of the toolbar installations, which wasn’t always the case with Grokster and other, older file-sharing apps. Still, P2P users abandoned Kazaa in large parts because of all the added software. The same could happen to Vuze, Pando and BitTorrent if desperation in the face of the downturn drives them to become too aggressive about affiliate apps that their users don’t really need or want.

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Vuze Confirms Layoffs

Janko Roettgers — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:36:15 +0000

A tipster reached out to us this week to tell us about layoffs at the Redwood City, Calif.-based P2P video startup Vuze, stating that the company had dismissed more than half of its workforce. Vuze subsequently confirmed two rounds of previously unreported layoffs to us, but clarified that the dismissals were not recent: 12 people were let go in April and another 12 in August. “We anticipated that the economic environment was going to deteriorate, so we decided to act proactively,” said Vuze’s V-P of marketing, John Fernandez.

Vuze has been building an ad-supported download platform for HD videos based on its BitTorrent client, which used to be known as Azureus. The company recently put the client through a major revamp, and Fernandez told me that things are looking up in terms of revenue and video views. Vuze did lose some key content partners in recent months, something CEO Gilles BianRosa recently attributed to the move away from download sales.

To date, Vuze has raised a total of $32 million in three rounds of funding from BV Capital, Greycroft Partners and others. After the job cuts, the company moved its 31 employees out of its prime office location in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., to a presumably less expensive space a few minutes away, in Redwood City. It also discontinued its work with a PR agency and instead now handles all press relations in house, another sign of cost-cutting.

Vuze’s video platform had originally started with a combination of free, ad-supported and paid downloads, with content both from niche producers as well as major TV networks. However, selling content to file sharers hasn’t been working all that well. Competitor BitTorrent Inc., which is also running a download platform for TV content, was forced to lay off part of its workforce earlier this year and has been deemphasizing its download offering in recent months. Vuze’s own web stats show that even hit shows like Weeds only generate a few hundred downloads per for-pay episode.

That’s why Vuze has been moving away from sales and towards ad-supported downloads – a move that not everyone seems to agree on. Content partner Showtime hasn’t published any new complete episodes on Vuze since April, and shows from former partners Starz and the BBC have completely disappeared from the site.

However, it looks like Vuze has been making some progress on the advertising front. Fernandez told me that Vuze’s revenue has increased five-fold since April, and that Vuze now expects to break even in 2009. He also stated that the company has seen a 30 percent increase in video views since it published version 4.0 of its client earlier this month.

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Vuze Takes A Gamble With New Client

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:43:04 +0000

Vuze Inc. is introducing version 4.0 of its BitTorrent client later this week in an effort to both win back hardcore P2P users and broaden the overall user base of the file sharing protocol. Vuze 4.0 features a completely revamped interface, a new (and actually pretty clever) subscription mechanism, as well as the option to search third-party torrent sites like Mininova. The application continues to offer access to Vuze’s own content platform, albeit in a slightly less in-your-face kind of way. The content patform, now called Vuze HD Network, is also shifting directions.

Vuze 4.0 is an interesting piece of software, if only because it shows how difficult it is to monetize P2P. Competitors like BitTorrent Inc. have tried and failed to convert users into paying online video customers. Vuze is now taking a gamble by going back to its pirate-friendly roots, hoping to convince both its users and content owners to give free and ad-supported P2P-downloads a chance. It’s risky — but it may just be the only thing that works.

Vuze’s transition from an open-source application called Azureus to a P2P-powered online video platform hasn’t been without challenges. The platform initially launched as Zudeo in December 2006, then re-branded as Vuze, and the Azureus moniker got lost somewhere along the way. The original Azureus user base was confused by these moves. Quite a few abandoned Vuze for clients like uTorrent and Transmission. Torrentfreak reported earlier this year that uTorrent is now installed on more than 13 percent of all PCs, whereas Vuze only has a market share of about 5 percent. Vuze used to be in the lead as little as 18 months ago.

Vuze CEO Gilles Bianrosa told me a few days ago that his company wants to make up for those losses with a new interface that is supposed to make both beginners and experienced users happy. “The world of BitTorrent is a very fragmented ecosystem,” he told me, adding that many users would go to torrent search engines to find content, acquire the .torrent meta file from another site, download the content with an app and finally play it with a separate player. Vuze wants to simplify this experience by offering to search torrent sites and play video files right within its client. Advanced users can also subscribe to search results and automatically download periodic content.

Granted, subscriptions like these are not entirely new. In fact, Vuze has been offering RSS-based subscriptions through plug-ins for a while, but the new client adds an interesting social component to it. Users can decide to anonymously share their subscriptions with the rest of the Vuze community in a way that is a little bit like those customer-generated book lists on Amazon. Search for a file on Vuze, and you’ll see if the file is part of any subscription, complete with the offer to subscribe as well. That’s a clever way to utilize implicit social behavior, and it could help to get expert and novice users to cooperate.

Vuze’s hope is that this newfound utility will help to grow its user base, and that those users will eventually embrace the Vuze HD Network as well. The content platform used to be a mix of user-generated videos and content from TV networks that oftentimes was only available for cash. Bianrosa told me that the company is now moving away from lower-quality videos, with the goal to eventually just feature DVD-quality and HD content.

The company has lost some of its bigger partners in recent months, with both the BBC and Starz now completely absent. Bianrosa attributed that to a second shift, away from for-sale titles and towards ad-supported content. Apparently not everyone is willing to make that switch, but Bianrosa believes that it’s the right way to go if you want to monetize P2P. “We are targeting a user base that really doesn’t like to pay for things,” he told me.

In other words: Vuze is targeting P2P pirates, and it’s not willing to pretend otherwise anymore. That’s why the client allows its users to search Mininova.org, a site that got sued by the MPAA just a few months ago. “People are already searching those sites,” said Bianrosa, adding that with Vuze there was at least a chance to expose them to licensed content as well.

Of course, this argument goes both ways: If you want to reach experienced P2P users with legal offerings side by side to other search results on an easy to use platform, you inadvertently also risk exposing novice users to unlicensed content. That’s a risk that BitTorrent Inc wasn’t willing to take, which is why its content store failed. Vuze has definitely learned a lesson from failures like this — let’s just hope content owners have as well.

Note: The release of the client was scheduled for today, but has been pushed back by Vuze until Wednesday.

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Vid-Biz: Open Market, Sharing, MyToons

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:30:19 +0000

Hollywood Studios Band Together for “Open Market;” initiative is a set of policy decisions and software and services framework to enable DRM interoperability. (TechCrunch)

New Research Looks at Online Video “Super Sharers;” Sharpe Partners reports that 75 percent of super sharers find ways to skip ads, and video isn’t about creative expression as much as it’s about sharing real life experiences. (MarketWatch)

CNET Gets a Redesign; videos are now embeddable!

MyToons Partners with Vuze; animation community to provide vintage animation channel for the BitTorrent video network. (release)

I-Rights to Distribute Do You Believe Me?; new online series from producers of Sofia’s Diary is about a 17-year old girl with recurring nightmares. (C21Media)

Nielsen: 114.5 Million TV Households for 2008 – 2009 Season; increase of 1.5 percent over last year. (release)

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