The company did a first test featuring local DJ Janaka Selekta last week and is now officially promoting the event series on Facebook and Twitter. From the newly launched BitTorrent Live Studio Facebook page:

“BitTorrent Live is rolling out exciting live events every Friday in order to kick the tires on our new peer-to-peer live streaming technology. Help us define the future of live streaming by testing our software and promoting the live studio sessions.”

BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen and his team have been working for close to three years on a new P2P platform that makes it possible to stream live content with minimal latency. We were first to report earlier this month that the company is now moving to the next stage in the development of its live streaming platform, which involves larger stress tests of live content.

The next of these tests will star Six Degrees Recording Artist Jef Stott on October 21 at 5 p.m. PDT

Check out an interview with Bram Cohen about his live streaming platform below:

Image of the studio setup in BitTorrent’s offices courtesy of BitTorrent Inc.

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BitTorrent Director of Product Management for µTorrent Jordy Berson told me the following in an email about the release:

“µTorrent Plus offers a few key things our users have been asking for, most importantly play any file on any device and added security. While we are fully committed to the free µTorrent, we’re really excited to offer people something new.”

µTorrent has long been the most popular Windows BitTorrent client out there. Advanced users value its minimalistic simplicity, which can be challenging for newcomers. BitTorrent Inc. is trying to address this by making playback and portability of content easier in the Plus version, while at the same time, keeping the pure µTorrent experience in the free version of the app.

That approach seems clever, and it could also help BitTorrent to add another source of revenue to its business. The company has been almost exclusively dependent on bundled software that’s offered to users during the installation process and through dedicated content channels.

These kinds of affiliate partnerships are common in the P2P space, but they can also be risky. Video software and codec maker DivX at one time generated 21 percent of its revenue by bundling the Yahoo toolbar with its free products. Then Yahoo pulled out — and DivX had to lay off 10 percent of its workforce.

BitTorrent didn’t really want to acknowledge these issues played a role in its decision to launch µTorrent Plus, with the company’s chief strategist Shahi Ghanem telling me via email, “µTorrent Plus is not designed as a business-oriented release but was specifically created to give our users the transcoding and security features they’ve been asking for.” Still, I’d bet BitTorrent’s investors and employees are feeling good knowing the company is diversifying its revenue streams.

Want to try out µTorrent Plus Alpha yourself? Follow this link for one of 500 invites.

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A new BitTorrent Live website built with these kinds of tests in mind launched a few days ago, but a company spokesperson cautioned that “a broad beta is still a couple of months away.”

BitTorrent has been testing its live streaming platform with a limited number of users at a no-frills website that hasn’t been publicized but has nonetheless been publicly accessible for some time at live.bittorrent.com. At the end of last week, the site suddenly received a significant face-lift, complete with installation instructions for the BitTorrent Live software and a brief explanation that reads:

BitTorrent Live is a whole new P2P protocol to distribute live streamed data across the internet without the need for infrastructure, and with a minimum of latency.

Users can download BitTorrent live clients for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The client simply works in the background to facilitate data transfer and doesn’t allow any configuration. Video streams display in the browser via Flash, and a Facebook plug-in allows users to chat with one another while watching a stream. An additional tab offers access to the audio and video bitrate and other debug data.

BitTorrent has been using prerecorded video to test its live streaming, but it plans to expand to live events for further tests.

Speaking of video: BitTorrent’s spokesperson told me that the tests have so far been restricted to “simple pre-recorded content loops to test latency and audio/visual sync.” I was able at one time to tap into a prerecorded stream of a winter sports event but at other times simply didn’t get to see anything.

However, those P2P live streaming tests could get a lot more exciting soon: “One of the ideas is to invite a few of our favorite indie artists into our office to broadcast content and help us kick the tires with their fans,” said BitTorrent’s spokesperson. Still, don’t expect BitTorrent to stream Coachella anytime soon. I was told that “the redesign isn’t intended to suggest we’re out of the R&D stage of designing, building and testing the product.”

BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen has worked on the live streaming platform for close to three years, and he told me at NewTeeVee Live last year that his efforts included writing a complete new P2P protocol from scratch. The BitTorrent protocol itself, he said, simply introduced too much latency to be a viable live streaming solution. Check out the entire interview below:

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The disappointing thing about Janko Roettgers’s post for GigaOm’s NewTeeVee section yesterday is its casual promotion of the idea that stealing movies, TV shows and music is a perfectly acceptable way to save money.

Roettgers writes at length about recent changes in online video offerings, but his real point is this:

“The U.S. credit ratings downgrade, tumbling stocks and international instability have made not just financial analysts nervous this week. Consumers are also starting to wonder whether we’re about to enter another recession. Whenever that happens, people start to tighten their belts and cut unnecessary expenses — like paying for movies and TV shows… With memories of the housing slump still fresh, many people could simply return to BitTorrent and download movies for free instead of going to the movies or paying for VOD.” (emphasis ours)

There’s no question that when people aren’t certain about their finances — because they’re worried they or someone in their family will lose their job, or the prices of gas or other essentials will rise significantly — they change how they think about expenses and spend money. But if Roettgers had written that financially insecure families will shoplift clothes from a department store this fall to save on back-to-school costs for their children, he would be laughed out of the proverbial building, right?

T-shirts and jeans aren’t made out of zeroes and ones, at least not yet. But just because movies and TV shows and songs can now be packaged and distributed as data, not just as film reels or vinyl records or DVDs, and can be acquired or distributed with a few clicks of a mouse, doesn’t mean that the labor and time and money that went into making them is any less meaningful.

We doubt many people will subscribe to the kind of intellectual dishonesty that suggests that it’s fine — or really, that it’s inevitable — to steal as a way of saving. But it’s troubling that by suggesting that stolen content available on rogue sites and elsewhere is just another substitute good, Roettgers is tacitly arguing that content theft is legitimate and socially acceptable. Truth is, it’s neither.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY-SA 2.0) Flickr user Seth Anderson.

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We’ll have to wait for the actual switch-over to the authentication system for any hard data, but here’s a clue to how much is at stake for Fox: The official launch of Hulu in early 2008 reduced the number of U.S.-based viewers who got their Fox shows from BitTorrent by up to a third for some of the more popular shows on the network, according to data from TorrentFreak.

TorrentFreak has been tracking weekly BitTorrent file-sharing trends for years, and its editor, Ernesto, told me on Wednesday via IM that the number of U.S.-based downloaders of the Fox show Prison Break decreased by 36 percent from October 2007 to October 2008. The Simpsons saw a slightly less dramatic decrease of 23 percent, and the number of people downloading Family Guy from the U.S. was only down 10 percent in the same time period.

Why is there such a discrepancy between shows? Ernesto explained that the amount of piracy between shows can be influenced by a number of different factors, including the genre, viewership demographics and the time slot they air during.

However, few doubt that there will be a direct impact on piracy. “It’s like flipping a switch,” said Eric Garland from the Los Angeles–based media measurement company BigChampagne during a phone call on Wednesday, adding that he has seen “immediate and direct correlations” between the availability of online content on sites like Hulu and piracy.

Of course,  the world of television has changed a lot since 2008. Content is now available through a wider variety of sources, with people using more DVRs and cable VOD systems that offer more content than in the past. TV Everywhere could just be seen as another alternative, and its proponents might argue that Fox viewers will still be able to access the content as long as they’re authenticating themselves as subscribers of a participating pay-TV provider.

However, Garland thinks that piracy is still a viable alternative for many, just because it’s easier than jumping through authentication hoops. “We have still not made the process effortless enough,” he told me, comparing authentication to issues the music industry faced with DRM a few years ago and arguing that DRM eventually ended up punishing honest customers the most while not really preventing piracy. “People don’t like to be inconvenienced when they are playing by the rules.” In other words: People might just go for BitTorrent or unlicensed streaming sites and watch content ad-free if they feel like they’re being forced to jump through unnecessary hoops to watch an ad-supported episode of a TV show online.

Pirate picture courtesy of Flickr user Juliana Coutinho

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Crowd-financed film making has sometimes been decried as a way for amateurs to produce scripts written fresh out of film school for budgets that Hollywood usually spends on catering, but A Lonely Place for Dying is in a bit of a different league. The movie has been shown at numerous film festivals and was nominated for 45 awards of which it has received 19, including 14 for best motion picture. Its cast includes Six Feet Under actor James Cromwell, who is also credited as the film’s executive producer. Evans told me during a phone conversation on Wednesday that his team initially wanted to go down the traditional indie release route.

But then about a dozen offers from Hollywood came in, including $50,000 commission fees and rights that had to be signed away forever — and everyone started to look for other options. Evans said that VODO had been on his radar for about a year and the success of the VODO-exclusive TV show Pioneer One had been especially encouraging. Still, convincing everyone that it would be a good idea to give the movie away through technology better known for piracy wasn’t exactly easy. “There was a lot of fear,” Evans told me.

Those feelings only echo the reservations that studios have about anything that questions their established ways of doing business. “Hollywood is absolutely paranoid about flipping the window model,” said Evans. However, after contemplating the different options, Evans and his team decided that BitTorrent would be their first window. Asked if this could hurt the chances of people going to see his movie in the theater, he argued that even the most popular VODO release hasn’t seen much more than three million downloads, many of which came from outside the U.S. That still leaves plenty of people to watch the movie on the big screen, he explained.

But will file sharers pay for the movie? Evan hopes so, admitting that the stakes are much higher than for some other films that have relied on VODO and similar crowd-sourced financing. That’s why A Lonely Place for Dying isn’t relying on donations alone; the VODO release is sponsored by Verisign and .TV. The movie is also released in five parts for maximum impact.

But in the end, Evans sees BitTorrent and crowdsourced donations just as a way to get into theaters. He has already booked a few theaters and eventually wants to take the film to as many as 200 screens, all without any outside help. “The system wants to believe that we have to do it their way,” Evans told me. He’s out to prove them wrong, and now counts on file sharers to make that happen.

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Check out a trailer for the show below:

NRK is also streaming the entire trip live online, and the live stream has gotten some significant attention from outside of the country. Forty-six percent of the stream’s audience is from outside of Norway, according to NRK. The live stream is accompanied by a map widget that shows the position of the ship at any given time, complete with a number of overlays, as well as a live chat widget and Google Earth integration.

But NRK doesn’t stop there. The broadcaster is also making a lot of the recorded material available as 1080p HD BitTorrent downloads, which are licensed under a liberal Creative Commons license. Downloaders will be able to remix the material and even use it for commercial purposes, as long as the resulting works are published under the same license and give credit to NRK.

This isn’t the first time NRK has experimented with long-form live broadcasts, online streaming and torrent downloads. The broadcaster aired a seven-hour train trip in 2009 and subsequently made much of the material available via BitTorrent. The show was a surprise hit, with a third of Norway’s TV population tuning in, and the torrent downloads led to a number of interesting remixes. But it’s not just about ratings, according to NRK’s Hurtigruten website:

“Programmes like this aren’t economically feasible for a commercial channel; to a large amount of the public it probably seems completely useless, but to some of our viewers it can have a very high value, be something they wouldn’t get in any other way, and in twenty or two hundred years, it will be a strange document of life at the edge of civilisation from a different time.”

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Hollywood has abstained from taking P2P users to court, but mass lawsuits like these are getting more common with smaller studios. FUNimation sued 1,337 downloaders of its Anime show One Piece in January, and the producers of The Hurt Locker sued close to 25,000 downloaders last week. These lawsuits typically target a large number of unnamed John Does in a single filing, with the intent of unmasking the downloaders’ identities during discovery.

Once rights holders knows the name behind an IP address, it pursues the alleged infringers individually and offers to settle in exchange for a cash payment. Rights holders have been hugely successful with these kinds of lawsuits overseas. Just this week, German ISPs said that they have to reveal the identity of some 300,000 subscribers per month. However, U.S. courts have been much more skeptical of this approach, and Funimation’s One Piece lawsuit was thrown out against all but one defendant.

The Legend Is Born: IP Man is a bit of a special case for FUNimation. The movie is a prequel to the highly successful martial arts flick IP Man, which was distributed in the U.S. by Warner Brothers. Funimation acquired the rights to The Legend Is Born earlier this month and plans to distribute it by December through various channels, including VOD and DVD. However, the movie was released in Hong Kong last summer, and imported DVDs have been selling in the U.S. for months. It has also been popular on torrent sites, where first copies appeared as early as last July.

Update: FUNimation sent us the following statement via email:

“As the local distributor of many titles entrusted to us by our partners around the world, part of our responsibility is to prevent infringement of those titles – such as The Legend is Born – Ip Man. The practice of illegal downloads is very harmful to our partners and as their rights are applicable, and enforceable, worldwide, we will continue to monitor and take action as needed.”

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“One of the things that we’re most proud of is we’re now finally beating BitTorrent,” Hastings told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Thanks to services like Netflix, Hastings said most Internet video is now paid for in the U.S. The hard part for content providers, he said, was coming up with a service good enough that people were willing to pay for, rather than just searching for free content on the Internet. Netflix has been able to provide that service by making its streaming videos available across a vast number of devices, and giving subscribers access to a wide range of library content for a relatively low price.

Netflix has also enabled content owners to make money on shows they previously weren’t monetizing. Hastings offered up Joss Whedon’s Firefly as one example of a series that had a rabid fan base that couldn’t find it under legal means prior to appearing on Netflix. At the same time, he quelled any rumors that the company could bring Firefly back from the dead.

“All of those actors are 10 years older and the sets are gone,” Hastings said about the show. But he added that before Netflix brought it online, Firefly wasn’t getting monetized and now Fox is getting paid for it.

One other way Netflix can provide value is in offering up prior seasons of shows that are still on the air. “Mostly what we’d like to do is prior seasons of big shows,” Hastings said, suggesting networks like Showtime and HBO as examples of networks that it would like to have those series from. “We’re trying to be a complement to their business… We do better on catalog content than anyone else. Then that generates demand for current seasons.”

Hastings gave Dexter as one example of a show that benefited from having early seasons available on Netflix. By doing so, viewers were able to tune in to prior episodes, building buzz and interest in new episodes when they air. While Netflix has managed to get some content providers on board with this line of thinking, others are more wary. Fox, for instance, recently licensed the first season of its hit show Glee to Netflix, but at the same time it’s seeing networks like Showtime pulling back episodes of shows like Californication from the streaming catalog.

Later in the interview, Hastings said HBO’s The Wire was the one show that he’d most like to add to Netflix’s streaming library. But it’s unlikely that The Wire — or any HBO show — will come to Netflix streaming anytime soon, as the premium cable network seems committed to driving pay TV subscriptions through its TV Everywhere initiative. “Their strategy is, if you want old HBO [shows], you subscribe to HBO and you have HBO Go,” Hastings said.

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Why did the filmmakers Julian Harvey and Enzo Tedeschi decide to go this route? Here’s a snippet from their website that speaks volumes:

“We have an entire generation who are being labelled criminals for using that tool. But perhaps rather than wasting millions of dollars fighting a losing battle against Internet piracy, we should try and find a way to embrace the possibilities that this new world brings…”

The duo didn’t just want to give the movie away and receive nothing in return. Instead, they came up with an interesting take on grassroots fund-raising for filmmakers: File sharers were encouraged to buy single frames of the movie to make up for any potential losses. The idea seems to work: Harvey and Tedeschi have already sold more than 37,000 frames for $1 each. All in all, there are 135,000 frames for sale.

This isn’t the first time BitTorrent has been embraced by filmmakers. The Yes Men released their feature documentary The Yes Men Save the World via VODO last year, and the platform has also been featuring the sci-fi series Pioneer One, which is available exclusively via P2P. However, it’s notable that file sharing isn’t the only way for horror fans to get The Tunnel. Aside from BitTorrent, the movie has also debuted on Showtime Australia  as well as on DVD through Paramount Home Video. In essence, adding BitTorrent to these traditional means of distribution means they’re taking cross-platform distribution to the max.

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It also made Hollywood and other rights holders aware of BitTorrent, resulting in mounting legal pressure. Suprnova’s admin Andrej Preston a.k.a. Sloncek eventually decided to shut it down in late 2004 — that is, until now. Suprnova.org relaunched this spring, but the site now features original web video productions instead of Hollywood flicks. I sat down with Preston to talk about lessons learned and plans for Suprnova’s future. Check it out:

The new incarnation of Suprnova.org is producing and distributing a number of shows, including Torrentfreak TV and a show based on the site FMyLife.com. Preston told me that the idea is to give these shows as much exposure as possible, which is why he is also once again embracing BitTorrent to distribute the videos. “Those are the sites that people visit to get content,” he said about torrents sites.

Preston told me that the years as the admin of Suprnova.org were definitely tough, especially because of the bad press he received. However, he thinks that in the end, the industry and consumers benefited from this early wave of BitTorrent piracy. “Without Suprnova, there would be no instant Netflix”, he said, adding: “There would be no $0.99 iTunes rentals.”

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Once a user shares a file with a friend, the file is automatically turned into a content channel. Links to that file can be shared via email, Twitter and Facebook, and anyone visiting that link will receive an offer to download the latest Chrysalis client with the specific content channel for the privately shared file pre-installed.

BitTorrent’s servers will seed the file for 30 days, and any downloads are facilitated through the BitTorrent protocol, meaning that any user that downloads a file automatically also becomes a seed. Users can also comment on a file, and BitTorrent hopes to foster “mini social networks” around these privately shared channels.

Sending files with Chrysalis.

Project Chrysalis was first unveiled with an alpha version in March. It replaced the default UI of the company’s uTorrent client with content channels, making it possible to subscribe to podcasts and similar forms of episodic content. A BitTorrent spokesperson told me this morning that the company wants to establish Chrysalis as its second major product next to its traditional uTorrent client. Chrysalis is only available for Windows currently.

uTorrent has been very popular with advanced BitTorrent users, but the interface and the process of finding and downloading torrents has been a challenge at times to people new to the P2P world. Chrysalis wants to simplify that not only with an easier-to-use interface, but also with an upcoming device certification program. BitTorrent is talking to device makers right now, and wants to have certified devices available by fourth quarter 2011. Users will then be able to easily play files on any certified device without having to do any manual conversion.

The idea of private BitTorrent sharing with server-based caching isn’t entirely new. Paris-based P2P start-up Vipeers offered a similar service four years ago with its Podmailing client. However, Podmailing eventually shut down due to exploding hosting costs. BitTorrent’s spokesperson told me the company isn’t planing to limit the size of privately shared files in the future, but that it wants to use the current beta to evaluate usage behavior.

One side effect of the new offering is that BitTorrent may have to deal with DMCA take-down notices for content shared by its users in the future. One-click host sites like RapidShare have been facing legal action by content owners. However, BitTorrent could likely make the case that it’s more of a private P2P sharing service like Pando, which has operated for years without any legal pressure.

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“In developing countries, BitTorrent is almost unusable on the typically low-bandwidth dialup connections,” the researchers behind BitMate write on their website. And no, we’re not just talking about the fact that it’s impossible to download a Blu-ray rip over a 56k connection. The problem for dial-up users is that BitTorrent is designed to be based on fair and equal exchange of data. If you upload a lot, you’re also rewarded with high download speeds. That helps to bring overall download speeds up since it forces clients not to be selfish — but the flip side is that users with very slow connections simply get shut out.

To change that, the team came up with the idea to cluster low-bandwidth clients: Users on dial-up networks don’t even try to upload data to someone with a fast cable connection and instead simply send those bits to each other. They’re also much more selective in their downloading behavior, thus avoiding duplicate downloads and other unnecessary downloads from high-bandwidth peers. And finally, they avoid cross-ISP traffic, which can be another big bottleneck in countries with a less-developed Internet infrastructure.

BitMate is the result of two years of development, I was told by the project’s lead Umar Saif, who is an associate professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Saif told me via email that his team has seen download performance improvements of up to 70 percent during the eight months of testing that preceded this week’s release.

The BitMate client is part of Saif’s work with the Dritte initiative, a project that aims to spur development through technology. “BitMate… provides a level playing field for the Internet users in the developing-world,” he explained, adding: “If you give people a means to efficiently access data, you’d be surprised what they can do with it!”

However, the research that goes into projects like BitMate could also help us to advance technologies in the developed world. Muneeb Ali, a PhD student at Princeton University who has been involved with Dritte since its early days, told me via email:

“Most of the research in developing regions involves working with greater constraints like unreliable power, slow connectivity, limited computational resources, and so on. The research done in these constrained environments can certainly benefit other areas, where a subset of these constraints exist.”

In other words: Be it mobile networks or near-field communications, we often face challenges when we try to bring existing applications to new environments. Taking a good look at the core design principles and assumptions that come with these technologies could help to make them work in these new environments without breaking them for the rest of us.

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But how much money are we actually talking about? According to the study, plugging your web site via BitTorrent can get you around $200 per day on average.

Scientists from Madrid; Darmstadt, Germany; and Eugene, Oregon took a closer look at thousands of torrents on The Pirate Bay and Mininova in 2009 and 2010, and their analysis revealed that a small fraction of users is responsible for 67 percent of the content on these torrent sites.

So who are these folks? Thirty percent of all torrents analyzed for the study were spam associated with anti-piracy agencies and others who tried to get people to download unwanted content through simple bait-and-switch tactics. Another 30 percent of the torrents came from publishers that had financial motives. Some were promoting private torrent sites that finance themselves through ads or donations, and others were simply promoting web sites and services — for example, by advertising porn subscriptions through adult movie torrents.

The scientists noticed some interesting patterns among these profit-driven publishers, noting, for example, that 40 percent of the people advertising private torrent sites publish content in languages other than English. But commercial torrents aren’t just limited to promoting porn and piracy: Researchers even ran into a church that used torrent piracy to promote its site.

There are still plenty of users who upload torrents just out of the goodness of their hearts, but uploaders with commercial incentives seem to be much more active, uploading a great number of, and much more popular, torrents. Fifty-two percent of uploaders of a random group sampling were altruistic, but this group was only responsible for 11.5 percent of the content uploaded.

The study points out that some publishers with commercial interests seem to make some good money with piracy: Top private torrent portals can generate as much as $3,700 per day by advertising their sites through torrents, and even a plain old porn site promoted through torrents can make $205 per day on average, the scientists estimated.

I know what you’re thinking: These estimates have to be taken with a grain of salt, if only for the fact that porn and torrent sites tend to generate much less income through advertising than other sites. Private torrent sites in particular aren’t usually money machines, but instead try to make ends meet in the face of significant hosting costs.

The conclusion drawn from these numbers is also debatable: That so much of the content comes from relatively few publishers with clear financial incentive could be piracy’s Achilles heel, the scientists argue: “The removal of these financial-driven publishers (e.g. by antipiracy actions) may significantly affect the popularity of these portals as well as the whole BitTorrent ecosystem,” they write. That could be the case. Or maybe those top uploaders would simply be replaced on no time by others out to make a quick buck.

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Senate Democrats Push For Even Tougher Net Neutrality Rules; Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), who has been active on tech issues, has introduced a bill that would toughen up the FCC’s net neutrality rules. (paidContent)

Was Jeff Zucker Really So Bad For NBC Universal?; Why is that we get so snippy when it comes to Zippy, to borrow Leslie Moonves’ favorite nom de putdown for Zucker? (paidContent)

2011 Oscars: Pirates Have to Wait Longer for Fewer Leaks; 20 of the 29 films nominated for Academy Awards are now available on BitTorrent in DVD quality. (TorrentFreak)

BitTorren…; Google has blocked the search terms BitTorrent and uTorrent from its Autocomplete suggestions. BitTorrent Inc. is not amused. (BitTorrent blog)

As part of its latest effort to get its client embedded on connected devices, BitTorrent is partnering with Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). Through the partnership, the software company hopes to establish a set of standards through which it will be able to stream downloaded BitTorrent files between PCs, TVs, Blu-ray players, mobile handsets and newer tablet devices.

The latest version of the BitTorrent client also places more emphasis on content, highlighting apps for creators and rights owners that make their content available over the file sharing protocol. BitTorrent has recently had some wins with some content creators distributing videos for free using its technology, and the latest version of the client places them front and center:

Most BitTorrent video distributors so far have been independent producers, like the makers of sci-fi series Pioneer One, but the technology has also been used by Dutch public broadcaster VPRO for distribution of a documentary about the U.S. economic crisis earlier this year. Either way, these distributors will be able to create apps like the one below for TED Talks:

While the release of its latest client is imminent, BitTorrent also plans to bring new functionality to the marketplace by productizing a live-streaming technology founder Bram Cohen has been working on as a side project. Cohen’s P2P-based live streaming technology, which he had been developing over the last two years under the code name Project Pheon, combines extremely low latency with extremely high offload for video delivery.

Cohen said in an interview that broadcasters could expect up to 99 percent offload for streams at scale, with latency around 5- 10 seconds. According to him, the new live-streaming client contains only about 2,000 lines of code, and produces streams that carry low overhead both for the device processor and on the wire. In addition, the streams should be able to gracefully navigate changes in network conditions, with a variable bit rate component that scales the quality of video streams delivered to the end user based on available bandwidth.

BitTorrent said the new live-streaming technology will be officially launched later this year, and the company is targeting enterprise and media customers that do large-scale live events. With such high offload, it believes the P2P live technology can benefit live sports and other fields that have large numbers of users show up for a limited time.

For an earlier interview with Cohen about live streaming from last year’s NewTeeVee Live, check out the below video:

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