Category Archives: BitTorrent Clients

BitTorrent Inc. To Launch All-In-One BitTorrent Ecosystem [Project Chrysalis]

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In the first quarter of 2011 BitTorrent Inc. will replace its mainline client with a brand new all-in-one solution for media entertainment. The new software will be part of a BitTorrent Certified technology ecosystem which includes TVs, mobile devices and other consumer electronics. By eliminating many technical hurdles the project, codenamed Chrysalis, is an attempt to cater to a wider range of consumers than uTorrent currently does.

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BitTorrent Inc. just announced that it will soon release a brand new BitTorrent client that integrates search, downloads and playback on multiple devices. With the new project BitTorrent Inc. is following in the footsteps of its main competitor Vuze and their already established all-in-one application.

The new application is part of project Chrysalis and a new ecosystem of BitTorrent certified products. Through the application users can search for files that are shared on BitTorrent, download these files, and play them directly on their computers, TV or mobiles devices. Everything is bundled into one system and downloaders don’t have to worry about conversion, codecs or file-formats.

“Today’s generation of consumer electronics devices are more powerful than ever before, but they still lack cohesiveness and ease of use for content playback,” BitTorrent’s chief strategist Shahi Ghanem said. “Consumers shouldn’t need to differentiate between codecs, file formats, bit rates, and other technology jargon. Content playback should just work – regardless of content type or source.”

The new application is expected to go live towards the end of the first quarter of 2011 and will replace the mainline BitTorrent client. uTorrent, the flagship of BitTorrent Inc and the source of the current mainline client, keeps its minimal footprint and will continue to be developed separately.

The Chrysalis project is an effort to keep more users on board than is currently the case. BitTorrent Inc. revealed earlier this week that uTorrent and the mainline client are downloaded 400,000 times a day, but a relatively small percentage of these new downloads result in recurring users due to the perceived complexity of the applications.

Project Chrysalis

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In addition to launching the all-in-one client, BitTorrent Inc. will start partnerships with makers of consumer electronics such as TVs, tablets and mobile phones to display a “BitTorrent Certified” logo. For this task the company signed up with Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) who previously helped DivX with their certification program.

“Partnering with BitTorrent to create the standards for a new generation of BitTorrent Certified chips, designs and devices fits perfectly with ITRI’s mission of accelerating the development of industry-enabling strategies and will certainly drive growth for Taiwan’s domestic technology industry,” ITRI’s Vice President Cheng-Wen Wu said.

We were assured that all the new software and standards will be fully compatible with the .torrent format as we know it now. For existing users little will change, but with the new system BitTorrent hopes to further expand the user base of its software while making it easier for existing users to play downloaded files on different devices.

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BitTorrent & uTorrent Hit 100 Million Monthly Users

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BitTorrent Inc. just announced that the BitTorrent Mainline client and uTorrent combined have hit the milestone of 100 million monthly users. On an average day 20 million users from over 220 countries fire up one of the two BitTorrent clients. If that’s not enough, the company also reports that 400,000 new clients are downloaded every day.

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uTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005 and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent application. The potential of the minimalistic client was soon picked up by BitTorrent Inc. who bought it in December 2006.

In the years that followed the original BitTorrent mainline client was gradually transformed into a rebranded version of uTorrent, and today BitTorrent Inc. announced that both clients combined now have more than 100 million active users a month. Users literally come from all over the world, with 20 million active daily users from over 220 countries.

“This is an exciting day for our team. Our vision is to build a complete technology ecosystem comprised of software, content and devices, designed to connect modern content creators with a massive digital audience,” BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker said. “This milestone highlights the size of our user base and the power of our software.”

BitTorrent Inc.’s acquisition of uTorrent is without doubt the best decision the company has ever made. Where other projects such as the “movie store” and CDN-services failed miserably, uTorrent’s popularity kept on growing.

The irony is that the company which founded one of the most innovative technologies on the web in the last ten years, has not managed to build a new business model around it. Perhaps the BitTorrent powered movie store and CDN were ahead of its time, but the fact is that the company now relies on a toolbar to pay the salaries of its employees.

While there is no shame in relying on toolbars to keep million of BitTorrent users satisfied with an entirely free experience, we can only assume that the company had a greater plan in mind when it was founded back in 2004. That said, toolbars do bring in some serious money.

In addition to the millions of daily active users, the BitTorrent Mainline and uTorrent client are downloaded by 400,000 people a day according to BitTorrent Inc. An unknown percentage of these new downloads also choose to install the toolbar, which is good for millions of dollars in revenue a year.

This stable stream of revenue ensures that BitTorrent Inc. can continue the development of uTorrent in the future, and that’s a welcome message to at least 100 million BitTorrent users. We congratulates BitTorrent for reaching this impressible milestone, and we’re eager to see how far this number can increase in the future.

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Transmission BitTorrent Client Has a Native iPhone App

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For many Mac users Transmission is the BitTorrent client of choice. Unfortunately, managing Transmission’s BitTorrent downloads on the iPhone or iPad can only be done through a web-interface. This annoyance is now resolved thanks to iControlbits, the first and only native iPhone app for the Transmission client that apparently escaped the prying eye of Apple’s anti-torrent police.

Image is Loading....Ten years ago, when BitTorrent was first released to the public, most people were lucky to own one computer with a connection to the Internet. Today, many people own several interconnected ‘online’ devices including smartphones, laptops and NAS servers.

To make BitTorrent downloads on one device accessible on others, all the major BitTorrent clients have developed web interfaces. These allow users to start, stop and pause downloads from wherever they are. Transmission, the favorite BitTorrent client of many Mac users, also has a web interface, albeit a limited one in the eyes of most iPhone and iPad owers.

To fill this gap, developer Luka Hlastec coded a native remote access App for the Transmission client named iControlbits. The App, which controls the Transmission client daemon via the RPC protocol, has more features than the standard web interface making it both convenient and useful.

“I’ve made it for myself, for managing transmission downloads,” Luka Hlastec told us when we asked him about his motivation to develop a Transmission App.

“I’m using Transmission daemon on my NAS device. With this app I can connect remotely to my NAS from everywhere and manage downloads and Transmission server settings. You can also start Transmission on your Mac and enable remote access and then connect with my app.”

Among other things the App allows users to start, stop, remove and pause current transfers. In addition, it can connect to multiple Transmission ‘servers’ with the option to set and change speed limits for the server as well as individual downloads.

iControlbits screens

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iControlbits, currently sold for $1.99 in the App store, works as advertised but could benefit from some extra features. In particular the option to add new downloads would be a nice one to have. The developer is aware of this and hopes to release it soon. “I have coded a feature for adding new downloads, which I’ll probably include in next version,” Hlastec told us.

But user satisfaction is not the biggest worry for the App – Apple’s anti-torrent police is the more imminent threat. As many people know, Apple is notoriously known for banning all applications that have anything to do with BitTorrent. This was kindly demonstrated three months ago when a new remote control App was booted from the App Store in just a few days.

Let’s hope that for Hlastec and Transmission using Apple customers, iControlbits doesn’t share the same fate.

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uTorrent Browser Toolbar Mystery Causes Confusion

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uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. recently signed up with a new toolbar partner. Last week millions of users got the offer to install this new addon with the upgrade to uTorrent 2.2, but it appears that it wasn’t that optional for everyone. Several disappointed users report that the Conduit toolbar was installed without notice, or even when they explicitly opted out. The uTorrent team regrets the dissatisfaction and is trying to get to the root of the problem.

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For a year a bundled browser toolbar has been one of themain sources of income for uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. The toolbar is offered to new users and is offered as an option with fresh installs.

With a few dozen million downloads a year, the added browser toolbar has provided BitTorrent Inc and the uTorrent development team with a healthy and much needed revenue stream. Initially, the Ask toolbar was promoted but recently a switch was made to the Conduit toolbar.

In addition to offering the toolbar to users who do a fresh install of the uTorrent client, the new Conduit toolbar was also promoted to users who upgraded to the latest uTorrent 2.2 release. However, this process didn’t go as smoothly as it should for everyone, and several our readers reported serious issues during the upgrade process.

Instead of getting a popup notification asking the user if they wanted to install the Conduit browser toolbar, it was instead installed on some users’ computers without any notification at all. Another group of users did get the popup, but when they chose not to install the toolbar, the software was installed on their computers nonetheless.

Over the last few days the uTorrent forums have been filling up with several of these confused users, and others wrote blog posts addressing this unexpected behavior and their frustration.

Despite several complaints the issues seem to be relatively isolated. We’ve tried to reproduce the “bug” on several systems but at our end everything went fine. Simon Morris, Vice President of product management at BitTorrent Inc. told us that they have no idea what went wrong either, but that they are aware of isolated issues.

“It has not escaped our notice and it is obviously NOT our intent,” Morris said.

Initially BitTorrent Inc. and uTorrent’s forum moderators denied that there was a problem at all. Instead, they were convinced that users must have selected the wrong checkboxes, which can be perceived as deceptive by some. However, this position became harder to hold as time went by and complaints kept coming in.

“We have seen some isolated suggestions that the toolbar installed even though the checkboxes were unselected. If this is indeed true then we would consider it a very serious bug. If anyone can help us reproduce this type of bug then we will investigate it and fix it immediately. In spite of extensive tests we have been unable to reproduce this particular problem,” he added.

uTorrent Browser Bar

Image is Loading....Morris further said that because of this massive rollout to all upgrading users, the level of attention is probably more amplified than usual. Many long time users see the toolbar offer for the first time and might be caught by surprise, or confused by the checkboxes. Although this is partially true, it would be wrong to simply deny that something went wrong during the upgrade process for some people.

The uTorrent team has promised to get to the bottom of the issue, and fix any errors that they come across.

“Both our team and Conduit’s team have been investigating further whether there is any problem with the install, but we have been unable to find any evidence that the toolbar will ever install if you deselect all 3 checkboxes. Conduit has found and is fixing one minor uninstall issue,” Morris said.

“We regret any dissatisfaction, and we welcome inputs on anything that may be going wrong. One thing is very clear – the offer is designed to be purely optional, such that if you deselect the offer checkboxes it will not install,” he added.

All uTorrent users who had the Conduit toolbar installed ‘accidentally’ can easily remove it via the Windows control panel where the software is listed as ‘Conduit’ and ‘uTorrent toolbar.’ Did you have any issues upgrading to the latest version of uTorrent or did it go smoothly? Please let us know and drop a comment.

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