Ashwin Navin, CEO and President of BitTorrent Inc, talks a little about the history of BitTorrent, from its creation in 2001 by the unemployed engineer Bram Cohen, through to its strong position today in 2007.
Ashwin Navin, president of BitTorrent Inc. has levelled some serious criticism towards Ohio University after it issued a blanket P2P ban on its campus network. Navin says the school has shown a serious lack of knowledge, has stifled innovation and demonstrated neglect as an educational establishment.
BitTorrent Inc. is experimenting with alternatives to paid downloads on their Entertainment Network, and is now experimenting with advertising supported downloads. Instead of paying for a download, BitTorrent’s customers now see ads before and after watching an episode.
When Bram Cohen was testing the BitTorrent protocol back in 2002, he used free porn to lure people into using BitTorrent. Five years later BitTorrent turned into a commercial venture, and it now charges their customers for downloading soft-porn clips of drunk teens showing off body parts. Times have changed.
The BitTorrent Video Store that was launched less than two weeks ago is facing some serious DRM issues. It is virtually impossible to play a great deal of the Movies and TV-shows they sell on computers that have a graphics driver older than 20 months.
BitTorrent Inc has released the final details of their long awaited video store. The store itself will go live this Monday, and will offer movie rentals at $2.99 - $3.99, and “download to own” TV shows and music videos for $1.99. The “BitTorrent Entertainment Network” will start off with 5000+ titles in their collection, including movies such as Superman Returns and An Inconvenient Truth, and the popular TV show 24.
A week ago, we wrote a reply on Mark Cuban’s view on BitTorrent. He said that BitTorrent has to overcome several challenges in order to become a successful ‘product’. Not surprisingly, Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent Inc and the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol, did not agree with Cuban, and wrote a reply as well. And that’s when things started to get out of hand.
BitTorrent president and co-founder Ashwin Navin said in an interview yesterday that third-party products like the recently announced ‘Netgear Entertainment Box’, together with the upcoming BitTorrent Video Store, have the potential to knock out competitive products that Apple and Microsoft are currently developing.
The self-acclaimed guru of IPTV, Mark Cuban claims that P2P, and more specifically, BitTorrent is doomed. Apparently, “conflicting clients”, lack of knowledge, limited Internet plans, and “bandwidth premiums” are going to be jointly responsible for the death of BitTorrent.
