Streaming capabilities have been added to BitTorrent via the Tribler client, and more recently uTorrent. Thus far the implementation of these technologies into major websites has been lacking. That position changed this week as the Wikimedia Foundation partnered with P2P Next to use BitTorrent-powered streaming for their video content.
Today BitTorrent Inc. announced two new Apps for uTorrent, one in collaboration with the organization that hosts the TED conferences and another that allows users to discover free music. The latter App is the winner of the uTorrent App developer challenge. It’s coded by Steven Viola who happened to have just released a TV-app through which users can download and subscribe to shows published on EZTV.
Today, BitTorrent Inc. officially debuts the BitTorrent Apps platform in a non-Beta client. The company chose the smaller BitTorrent Mainline client over their leading brand uTorrent for the release, giving 14 million users access to their App platform. The question is, however, how big the demand for Apps among BitTorrent users will be.
Earlier this year BitTorrent Inc. promised they would release a Linux client this summer, and today they are one step closer to achieving that goal. The company just released uTorrent Server for Linux, a daemonizable 32-bit binary of the uTorrent core, suited to those familiar with running programs from the command line. A full Linux client is expected to follow in the coming weeks.
A critical Windows DLL vulnerability that makes several widely used programs targets for remote hijacks surfaced in the news this week. Among the affected applications are Firefox, Adobe Photoshop and uTorrent. Since the news broke dozens of exploits have already surfaced. Luckily uTorrent was one of the first to fix the vulnerability and now all users are encouraged to update their client.
With an interesting addition to its survey of customer hardware, Valve has now published its first set of stats detailing which software is installed on the computers of those using its Steam client. While Flash, Acrobat and Firefox dominate the listings, BitTorrent clients also make a significant appearance. uTorrent is installed on almost as many systems as iTunes.
A few days ago the uTorrent team updated the 3.0 release with several privacy features. Due to some unfortunate wording, the new feature caused confusion among users. One of the new options, “do not share your IP with peers”, led some to believe that uTorrent had implemented a new feature that makes BitTorrent transfers anonymous.
In May this year the BitTorrent Inc. added a section to their site which enabled the community to vote for new features they would like to see included in uTorrent. Voting has been furious and dozens of new tweaks and additions have been made. Here’s the next eight major additions uTorrent users can look forward to.
Following in the footsteps of The Pirate Bay and the successful BitTorrent distribution platform Vodo, uTorrent has now embraced an artist of their own. Starting today, all new uTorrent downloads will be bundled with the latest album from PAZ, an up and coming musician who hopes to achieve stardom through BitTorrent.
BitTorrent Inc. has released a new App for uTorrent that allows users to find out what others people are saying about a torrent they’re downloading. Users can also join the discussion and use uTorrent to tweet about torrents. With the new App, BitTorrent Inc. hopes to streamline discussions about torrents on Twitter, and encourage torrent sites to adopt the new standard to make it a success.
The Vuze team has released version 4.5 of the popular BitTorrent client. With this latest release users can easily optimize their settings based on an elaborate speed test, which should increase download speeds in many cases. In addition, users can now transcode, transfer, and playback downloaded files on many of the most popular Android phones.
