Last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, China’s online video provider PPTV announced a strategic partnership with WASU Media Group. WASU is a local cable TV operator in one of China’s many provinces, but it has something really valuable for PPTV: A license to bring online video to the living room, which it has been using to bring triple play offerings to their customers. However, WASU’s license isn’t just restricted to the territory it works in. Instead, it’s able to launch online services on connected devices everywhere.

PPTV, which is also known as PPLive, has been trying to get into the living room for years. The company’s P2P video client is installed on 240 million PCs across China, and it has been adding some 30 million users with its iPad app and other mobile clients in recent years. The company worked on its own set-top box project some three years ago, but never shipped the device because China’s regulators were starting to crack down on similar offerings from competitors.

At the core of the issue is China’s complicated licensing framework, which requires that online video operators get separate licenses for addressing PC, mobile and connected TV usage. The TV space has been the most heavily regulated, and regulators have effectively been treating any video startup the same way they would treat an established cable TV operator.

The result has been that there hasn’t been a move towards streaming in the living room, as there has in the U.S. PPTV and WASU hope to change this by combining their efforts, while also securing a big share of the coming connected TV boom in China. Digital TV Research expects the Chinese online video market to grow from $50 million in 2010 to $1.38 billion in 2016, and connected devices could play a huge role in that growth.

The good news for PPTV’s competitors is that there are still other ways into the Chinese living room. Lenovo announced an Android-based TV set at CES, and Chinese CE manufacturers have been introducing countless Android-based set-top boxes in recent months. None of these devices has access to Google’s Android Market — which isn’t available in China — but consumers will nonetheless be able to install third-party apps from a variety of sources. This in itself could lead to a connected TV revolution within China, and possibly even force regulators to rethink their stance on online services in the living room.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user x-ray delta one.

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Not surprisingly, the number of viewers that are considering canceling skews higher the younger the respondents are: Nineteen percent of “leading Millennials” — those aged 23 to 28 — said they were considering canceling cable, with 13 percent of Gen Xers saying they were thinking about doing so. Of baby boomers, only 7 percent said they would consider cutting the cord, and older respondents were even less likely to do so, at just 5 percent.

The findings come as a greater number of viewers are catching on to free and subscription-based video services available online and streaming to their TVs and other devices. Twenty-two percent of respondents said they had watched their favorite TV show on a free online video source, and 21 percent said they had viewed that show on its own video site. The good news for networks is that those views are increasingly coming from legitimate sources: That compares to 15 percent who watched on a video sharing site or 4 percent who watched on a peer-to-peer network.

Viewers are also becoming more comfortable with watching TV shows on other devices: Nine percent watched shows on a gaming console, compared to 6 percent a year earlier. Smartphone viewing — up to 6 percent from 5 percent — and tablet viewing — 3 percent vs. 2 percent — also increased.

With movies, viewers are even more connected, according to the survey. Deloitte reports that 42 percent of users had streamed a movie in 2011, which was up from 32 percent a year earlier. Twenty-five percent did so as part of a paid subscription like Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Videos. That’s significantly higher than those who streamed as part of a onetime purchase, which 9 percent of viewers did.

While Deloitte makes the point that greater accessibility ultimately means more people accessing more content, it also means more people are realizing there are more choices for content outside the traditional cable model. As that happens, we expect even more to consider cutting the cord and finding their content elsewhere.

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TorrentFreak reported Thursday morning that Sabam wants Belgian ISPs to pay 3.4 percent of their subscribers’ monthly fees.

From the story:

“Sabam base their claim on a provision in the Copyright Act of 1994, which states that authors should be paid for any ‘public broadcast’ of a song. According to Sabam, downloads and streams on the Internet are such public broadcasts, and they are therefore entitled to proper compensation. This 3.4 percent share is the same amount as the copyright fees on cable television.”

The flip side of Sabam’s demands is that this levy is only meant to compensate rights holders for the ISP’s use of the music and not for the actual behavior of its customers. In other words: File traders would still break the law, even if their swapping was covered by a public performance fee like the one proposed by Sabam.

That may sound crazy, but it actually has more to do with the complexities of music licensing than Sabam’s current plans. The group only represents authors, composers and publishers, and it administers rights to the composition of the songs in its catalog. The actual recordings are owned by record companies, which aren’t compensated through this plan.

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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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LimeWire was one of the pioneers of P2P file sharing, and the company attracted millions of users after competitors like KaZaA and Napster were forced to shut their doors. At one point, estimates put LimeWire on every third PC worldwide. The company was eventually sued by the major labels in 2006, which alleged that it knowingly contributed to its users’ copyright infringement.

Company executives tried to deflect the lawsuit with a number of initiatives aimed at monetizing file sharing, which included an MP3 store, an ambitious attempt to monetize contextual advertising within LimeWire and finally a music subscription service. The big labels didn’t want any part of that and insisted that LimeWire instead had to shut down and pay for its sins. They eventually got what they wished for when U.S. District Court judge Kimba M. Wood sided with the music industry in May 2010, only to order a shutdown of the service in October.

LimeWire’s client has since been unusable, and the website links to a PDF of of Kimball’s court order instead of the LimeWire software. That doesn’t stop countless visitors from stopping by every month: Google Analytics clocked 1.1 million visitors in August alone. 85 percent of these were new visitors, which makes sense: The current injunction notice really doesn’t make you want to come back. 47 percent of those visitors came from the United States, and 53 percent were from other countries — a tribute to the fact that LimeWire was available in close to 20 different languages. More than half — 55 percent — of LimeWire.com traffic came from search.

In other words: LimeWire still has excellent Google juice, and it’s still very much on people’s minds despite having been all but dead for close to a year. Granted, converting all these file sharing users into paying customers is not an easy feat. However, services like Spotify have been fairly successful with freemium business models that capture people in need for free music and eventually get them to pay for a premium version. Maybe LimeWire should have been allowed to try the same. After all, chances are that all those folks who Google for LimeWire simply search for The Pirate Bay next.

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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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Kino.to was taken down last week when police in a number of European countries raided data centers, offices and residences, arresting 13 administrators of the site in the process. Kino.to was popular in Europe for offering access to Hollywood movies and U.S. TV shows. The raid has prompted retribution from hacktivists, but it has also prompted some users to worry about any legal fallout.

GVU admitted that there’s no legal precedent for users of a site like Kino.to being held liable for infringement. However, it argued that any stream leads to a temporary copy of a file in a user’s computer cache, which in the case of Kino.to could be seen as the reproduction of a copyrighted work without permission.

The case against Kino.to would “offer an opportunity” to test this legal theory in court, the organization suggests. In other words, to establish a legal precedent, GVU would be willing to sue individual users who merely viewed a TV show episode or a movie via Kino.to. Users could incur both civil and criminal liabilities, the organization argued, adding that criminal copyright infringement can lead to prison sentences of up to three years.

It’s still unclear whether GVU will actually have a chance to sue any viewers, much less have them thrown in jail: Kino.to didn’t host any of the material itself but instead offered a comprehensive catalog with links to file and video host sites. That means the incriminating evidence may not actually be on Kino.to’s servers.

However, German press reports indicate that law enforcement also took down at least one video host that was affiliated with Kino.to, opening up the possibility that at least some Kino.to users could actually get taken to court.

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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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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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When asked for comment about video streaming through the Netsession plugin, an Akamai representative said the company had nothing new to announce. But there are indications that it’s almost ready for primetime: At the National Association of Broadcasters show this week, the CDN “cloud services provider” was showing off its NetSession Interface technology to media companies. And on Akamai’s HD Network page, the company also has a demo of video streaming with what it calls the Akamai HDClient. (A link for further information routes back to the Akamai NetSession Interface page, suggesting that the HDClient and NetSession plugin are one and the same.)

Last fall, Akamai won a deal with the NFL for the delivery of HD video streams on the sports league’s website, which included the use of its Netsession plugin. But Akamai said the plugin wasn’t being used for in the typical peer-to-peer fashion, but to send information back to its servers and ensure that the end user was receiving the highest quality stream possible.

Akamai also rolled out a version of its client-side software for game publishers in March to improve the delivery of large game downloads. That client is being used by massively multiplayer online game publishers Aeria Games and Burda:ic. But downloading static files via P2P is relatively easy, and something that software providers have used for years.

The technology that’s required to capture bits from multiple seeds and put them in the correct order for streaming video is somewhat more complex. The benefits of P2P-based delivery are huge, as client-side technology drastically reduce the number of bits that a CDN has to deliver. More importantly, if implemented in the right way P2P technology can source bits from viewers closer to the end user, which takes much of strain off the global Internet architecture. P2P advocates have claimed for years that the only way the Internet will be able keep up with traffic demands is if video files can be streamed and sourced through local ISP networks.

For years, tech companies have been trying to crack the code for live and on-demand streaming via P2P — and while some, like Octoshape, have been fairly successful with limited implementations of the technology, it’s yet to receive mass consumer adoption. Perhaps the biggest reason is the need for a software client or plugin to make the technology work.

With the exception of Adobe’s Flash, which today is nearly ubiquitous, every streaming solution that has relied on new client software has struggled to gain massive scale, if only due to the need to install a client on the end user’s computer. Think Move Networks or Microsoft Silverlight. While not P2P-based solutions, the software install kept both plugins from reaching the same mass adoption that Flash appreciates.

When it goes live, Akamai will face this issue as well. In fact, it’s already received a bit of backlash from gamers who don’t understand what benefit the client provides while running silently in the background. A quick Google search for Akamai NetSession Interface shows user fears of viruses and malware, as well as the assumption that the P2P client will slow down their computers or Internet connections.

Akamai isn’t the only technology company that is trying to improve video streaming with P2P technology. Earlier this year, BitTorrent announced a live streaming solution based on a new P2P technology developed by founder Bram Cohen. And Adobe is making P2P-based streaming available as part of an update to its Flash Media Server.

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P2P lawyers score a victory, mass subpoenas can proceed; a federal judge in Washington, DC has decided that mass lawsuits against file sharers can continue, and the ISPs involved need to turn over names in a timely fashion. (Ars Technica)

YouTube co-founders may team on new start-up; Hurley and Chen are toying with an idea that has to do with indexing videos. (Media Maverick)

Piers Morgan to air live Twitter TV show Tuesday; Twitter founders @biz and @jack will be on the show, as well as “top tweeters” Martha Stewart and Alyssa Milano. (Lost Remote)

Xfinity TV App Update Brings More Features, Personalization; this is the third major release of Xfinity TV for iOS since its launch in November. (Comcast Voices)

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BitTorrent was originally designed with a central server dubbed tracker in mind which would help users interested in the same file find each other to facilitate downloads. However, these tracker servers have become a kind of Achilles heel of the P2P protocol. Once a tracker server goes down, the whole network goes down. BitTorrent programmers came up with a way to discover users without such a server that’s based on the Kademlia DHT technology.

This technology is based on individual BitTorrent clients randomly introducing themselves to each other to establish a kind of distributed directory. However, the presenter, going by the name Astro, showed that one can manipulate some of the data exchanged by BitTorrent clients for trackerless torrenting to introduce oneself to many more clients in the network than necessary and then tell those clients that a popular file is available under a certain IP address.

Astro said that nefarious users could utilize publicly available data from torrent sites like The Pirate Bay to find DHT hashes for some of the most popular files and essentially trick some of these downloaders into attacking a certain target. For example, one could tell tens of thousands of users that an HD version of Inception is available at an address that really is the web server of a corporation. All of these users would immediately try to download the file under that address, bombarding the server with requests and possibly taking it down in the process.

Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks were most recently used to take down the sites of major credit card companies as part of the Anonymous revenge for actions taken against WikiLeaks. However, users tend to actively take part in a DDOS attack. In the case of this type of exploit, users may not even be aware that they’re bombarding a bank server with bogus requests while they’re trying to download a movie file.

Astro said that some BitTorrent developers have proposed security measures to prevent this kind of exploit. However, the proposed idea includes a transition period to allow all clients to switch to a more secure version of BitTorrent. Astro said “malicious people” could still use this transition period to initiate DDOS attacks via BitTorrent.

Image courtesy of Flickr user kthypryn.

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File types indexed by Findthatfile.com.

Most popular amongst downloaders are movies and other video files with the extension AVI, followed by e-books in the form of PDF files, .RAR archives and .TTF font files. MP3s, on the other hand, are just slightly more popular than .DLL Windows library files. The picture looks a little different when it comes to the availability of files. PDFs  are still by far the most available file type, but MP3s rank second, followed by various types of file archives.

Does that mean people aren’t interested in downloading music at all anymore? Not necessarily. Single MP3 file downloads may have been partially replaced by downloads of full albums, distributed in the form of .ZIP or .RAR archives. But there are also a lot more choices for the casual listener to get their music fix.

In fact, impulse-driven single song downloading may have been replaced by YouTube music video viewing. Eight of the ten most-viewed publishers on YouTube are now artists or record labels. These music videos are increasingly a source of revenue for labels and their partners as well. Rhianna, Justin Bieber and Eminem all bring in over a million dollars per year through their YouTube videos alone, according to recent estimates.

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Watch the entire interview here:

Cohen has been working on his own live streaming solution for the last two years, and he said it has only recently become close to releasable. His new approach to P2P live streaming is being developed as a product of BitTorrent Inc., but the company has so far kept mum about what the product will eventually look like.

However, Cohen hinted at the possibility that BitTorrent will compete with live streaming sites like Ustream and Justin.tv. Asked whether this technology is for networks like ABC or a guy in his basement, he said: “ABC can afford to pay for whatever they want to do right now.” Users just starting out, on the other hand, often don’t have the infrastructure available to deal with possibly overnight success. “Peer to peer is really a democratizing technology,” he said.

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