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BitTorrent Inventor Bram Cohen On BitTorrent’s Future

In a recent interview BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen looked back at some of the failures his company had in the past, and how this changed their focus from selling goods and services to serving the 80 million monthly users uTorrent and the Mainline client have. Cohen also revealed what is expected to come in the future. His pet project, BitTorrent live streaming, will be released to the public soon.

BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the Mainline client and uTorrent, celebrated the big roll-out of the Apps platform at the NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco yesterday. One of the attendees was BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen. Cohen co-founded the BitTorrent company, (which is named after the famous protocol) back in 2004 and is currently still on the payroll as chief scientist.

At the event Cohen sat down for an interview to talk about the new App platform, and how the company came to be where it is now. Some of the failures such as the video store and BitTorrent’s CDN were briefly touched on, and according to Cohen these failures made them realize that the true power of the company lies with the millions of users of their software.

Together, the Mainline client and flagship uTorrent have a massive 80 million monthly active users, and more recently the company shifted most of its resources to the development of the clients instead of selling services and goods to the public.

This also meant that the company’s main source of income is now coming from the Ask toolbar that comes with their BitTorrent client. A rather old-fashioned and not entirely sexy revenue stream, but it pays the bills for the few dozen people at the company.

Finally, Bram Cohen talked about the direction the company is heading in the future, in particular his pet project – BitTorrent live streaming. His implementation, which will be released in a few months, should crush the competing streaming services currently out there in terms of latency and cost efficiency. It will be the ideal platform from which to stream sports events, news events, and webinars according to Cohen, and will allow individuals to stream content to millions of people without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth.

Check out the full interview below.

The Q&A

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  • Sophia

    Does everyone agree that Bram Cohen should be awarded the Nobel Prize!

    This is no joke, by the way, and it just MIGHT happen in the future.

  • Rick

    Can’t wait!

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  • Alexey

    Would be awesome, if someone posted this in mp3 format.

  • Anonymous

    That was one certainly very interested interview, covering some real juicy information.

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  • Le Fake

    While I appreciate his amazing input into the whole file-sharing culture, it’s funny how he still looks like an average guy, picked randomly from the street! A suit could do wonders PR wise :)

  • anonymous

    I second the Nobel piece prize… Bram is a genius!

  • StOmPeR

    Nobel Prize?? Nahhh they give that to idiots now – just Ask Obama – He got while being in 2 full blown wars – LOLZ – Nobel PEACE prize – give me a break

    Ron Paul 2012

  • IMTDb

    On of the things he highlights very well is the fact that the lack of flexibility given by the media firms is a major factor in the failure of the whole “sell content online” model.

    When you compare the ease of use provided by the movie you can find on our website compared with what you get when you download a show online. We can only agreed to that point of view.

    Todays equation is clear :
    piracy is :
    - free
    - slow
    - complicated to download
    - easy once you have the content

    while legal content is :
    - expensive
    - fast
    - complicated to download
    - complicated once you have the content

    And while we see that the piracy world tries to improve its service (websites like ours to easen the access, private trackers to improve the download speed) little is done by the majors to improve their services (impossible to pay without credit card, DRM all over the place, prices still way too high).

    The key factor here is the fact that, I think, Cohen is aware of this and really wants to change the game using bittorrent as a distribution channel for the industry.

    Lets hope that they will see that and we will finally have access to a true legal system for online media experience.

    — Admin of : http://imtdb.kicks-ass.org/ —

  • Because You Can’t Torrent Beer

    To remix a line from Swordfish: I never understood the appeal of streaming. A little too much like masturbation without the payoff. I can see how streaming sports would be nice because who wants to own reruns of past sporting events… For everything else, though, it’s better to download and own.

  • Ninja

    Respect. Although the bt streaming thing might need to address the stupidly slow upload speeds worldwide.

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  • Anonymous

    I rarely see a torrent for a sporting event because once the event is over interest dies down fairly fast.

    There were torrents for the last olympics but a streaming option would have been fine if it worked good. After the olympics is over no one cares or wants to keep the video so streaming works good for events like this.

    Only large sporting events might work because local ones would not have enough seeders to work. The other problem is that I am not a dedicated enough fan to pay very much for an event. Anything more that $1 or $2 per event would be too much.

    I wished torrent software could encrypt both the data and the ip so that spying (monitoring of torrents) would be impossible. That way all swarms they tried to join would reject any monitoring because in order to join you would have to agree to encryption of any incoming ip and could not therefore monitor it since if you wanted to know it and monitor it you would be rejected.

    I look forward to some way other than vpn of course to restore privacy. I hate the fact that the Riaa or MPAA can get your private info without a court order. If isp’s can’t respect privacy then we need to regain it by encryption.

    If Mr Cohen wants to make money then he needs to redo the bit torrent protocol with encryption and patent it. Then any client that wants to include that functionality would have to pay bit torrent a royalty. I would gladly pay $30 for a torrent client that I knew would make it impossible for the RIAA or the MPAA or the isp to send me threatening letters.

  • DarknezzFallz

    Bram sounds kinda… well… fruity… lol
    Im sure at this rate he will find the answers to his own questions and bring a new era of bt. Lets just hope its not what starts skynet.
    The Mechines are coming!!!

  • german

    he will revolutionize online porn publishing and i think maybe ppv sporting events. hopefully he will put some ip anonymity in there because that is what users want. :)

  • Anonymous

    I didnt think anybody actually installed the ask toolbar.

  • Caveman

    Torrent = The best invention ever!

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  • bootytape.com

    I can see the appeal for reduced cost for live streaming of adult content.

    He doesn’t mention it, but if it’s only a 5 second delay and the cost is greatly reduced, his service or technology could be adopted widely in that field.

  • Wal-Mart

    Bram Cohen doesn’t know what he’s talking about. All he’s doing is providing more models for people to steal revenue from artists.

    He didn’t even make bittorrent so why does it matter what he says. If we keep stealing from artists and the movie company’s we wont have anything left. They are losing alot of money.

  • momoola

    @8 (IMTDb)

    “Todays equation is clear :
    piracy is :
    - free
    - slow
    - complicated to download
    - easy once you have the content”

    Actually, I’m going to have to partially disagree with the second one and entirely disagree with the third one.

    It’s slow depending on the amount of peers and leeches, as well as your connection speed, but not all the time.

    It’s not complicated at all to merely download the content (except maybe for extremely new computer users).

  • german

    > steal revenue from artists.

    explain how live streaming will steal revenue from artists. maybe live concerts, but the applications were already stated as primarily being for sporting events, news, webinars, etc. if by artists, you mean porn producers and workers, then yes, possibly.

  • Phillip

    Now if only could convince bittorrent.inc to undo the ghastly redesign of utorrents interface.

    Especially the Tree style side panel, suddenly having labels means exploding it across half the screen rather than sitting nice and compact on the side.

  • Sean

    @20 phillip

    uTorrent has had labals as long as I can remember.
    You can make the side panel as wide or thin as you want it.

  • Danny

    Ask has re-purposed (killed) its search feature. I wonder how much revenue BT will get once people stopped using the toolbar. Could it still survive?

  • Phillip

    @21 Sean
    I use dozens of labels to keep track of various things, my complaint is about the new UI.

    Download 2.2 and you will see what I mean by how the new tree layout pretty much causes havoc on the side panel.
    If you love labels you will pretty much hate 2.2

    I immediately reverted to 2.0.4 in order to keep my screen tidy.

  • Jay

    BitTorrent is kinda ‘dirty’ right now, so it would help hugely if they could get a few early adopters who have a good standing, like TED.com for instance, even though it’s not live from TED i have no doubt they would benefit from a decentralized streaming solution for their content.

  • anon

    @11 Yes a Torrent site with technology that keeps everything private & hidden from from predatory extortionists like the RIAA and their ilk would be worth $30.00 a month to me also. I’m not knowledgeable enough to say if such a service would be possible. I think the constitution of the United States was supposed to do this for us. LOL

  • www.Searchr.Us

    Thanks for this share :

    http://www.hackmeout.net

  • lverona

    I can’t watch this – it just takes ages to load, then plays two seconds, stops, goes back to the beginning and then waits some more. And I have excellent Internet connection. I hope this interview is on YouTube.

  • cheery44

    .

  • Anon

    i like streaming..

    i use hulu desktop app on my htpc and use ad muncher to remove those annoying ads and it saves me a lot of time from having to look up each torrent..

    plus a alot of shows i dont really care to keep, just not worth it.

  • Drake3

    “To remix a line from Swordfish: I never understood the appeal of streaming. A little too much like masturbation without the payoff. I can see how streaming sports would be nice because who wants to own reruns of past sporting events… For everything else, though, it’s better to download and own.”

    The issue with downloading and owning is that you need to have a place to put it. If you are poor (like me) you can’t afford terabytes of hard drive space or tons of DVD’s and CD’s to burn. Plus, only the good shows, movies, music, and games will be used over and over, for the rest, it is nice to be able to just click a button to watch and then close it.

    Also, that quote confuses me a bit, masturbation doesn’t take a long time the first time and then get quicker each subsequent time. It more seems like it depends on your connection.

  • Dia

    Individuals don’t have millions of viewers and you can satisfy 20 000 with ustream.

  • vk.com

    The Riaa are dos hacking vk.com right now. How come they don’t get sued for doing it but we get sued for downloading music. It’s a bigger crime to dos hack.

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  • whipped

    I was thinking 30.00 US for the client. One time cost with updates.

    Monthly fees? Fail!

  • youKnowItsTrue

    Am I the only one who thought he sounded gay?! He’s definitely gay, he just doesn’t know it yet.

  • Anonymous

    Great story! Can’t wait to pirate this!

  • bonebone

    i think utorrent would be OK if it had a little text based add box with in the client. program it to advertise on the stuff your downloading or something like that…

  • Anon

    Bram Cohen is a thief and a criminal just like ya all pirates.

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  • UNF

    excellent interview, I think LS will be very much appreciated by online radio stations / podcasters to cut bandwidth overheads.

  • joaquin

    Bitorrent works on the TCP transport stack.
    The IP is on the network stack and routers and switches along he path need the IP unencrypted.

    The only way to do this would have been if he had done bitorrent on the network stack and switches and router would have to be able to decript…

    in other words, sadly it would not be possible.

    However, if you were to eliminate the tracker requirement from a torrent it would be impossible for the RIAA to know who is sharing what….the question is how!

  • ahem

    Ive always wanted to ask Bram if he regrets writing Bittorrent; knowing what a drama-fest its become and how it just, kinda, turned the whole world onto filesharing.

  • Stream Torrent

    I don’t understand why the already available (and has been for a couple of years) program Stream Torrent isn’t mentioned in all this revolution of streaming live television/events talk. The program is great, and used widely at places like myp2pforum.eu, where people watch tons and tons of live sports daily. This dude is inventing something that already exists…

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