BitTorrent’s user base is growing month by month and has reached a level where reputable marketing research companies have started to look into the phenomenon. Over the years Nielsen Media has optimized their ratings system for television, radio and films - but on the other hand their BitTorrent traffic estimates are far from accurate.
With an estimated 50 million users at any given time of the day, BitTorrent has established itself as the leading way to share large files online. As a consequence, BitTorrent applications are among the most installed and most frequently used applications on today’s computers. So, what BitTorrent client are you using?
New users of uTorrent may shortly have the option of something extra with their BitTorrent client. In a move to try and generate extra revenue, some of the of new installs will have the option to include the Ask.com browser toolbar in addition to the most popular torrent client in use today.
There are many ways for ISPs to manage the increased load BitTorrent traffic places on their network. Some choose to interrupt BitTorrent transfers like Comcast did, but there are more ‘consumer friendly’ alternatives too. An Israeli Internet provider is adding local web-seeds to speed up torrent transfers and reduce the amount of international traffic.
The credit crunch has impacted the global financial market and many businesses are struggling to survive the economic downturn. Now, a rare academic publication on private BitTorrent trackers suggests that the same is happening in private BitTorrent communities.
The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the largest and most popular in the United States. For the fifth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-free, RIAA-safe collection of songs totaling 6 GB, which can all be downloaded for free, thanks to BitTorrent.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Role models’ tops the chart this week. ‘Punisher War Zone’ is the first BluRay rip to make it into our weekly download list.
A recent analysis of the latest P2P trends wordwide shows that BitTorrent is still the most popular filesharing protocol. P2P traffic in general shows a slight decline, but BitTorrent traffic is still on the rise. It is responsible for more than 45-78% of all P2P traffic, roughly 27-55% of all Internet traffic depending on geographical location.
BitTorrent is often praised as an indestructible force moving petabytes of data around every day. It does have an Achilles’ heel though, and prominent p2p researchers warn that millions of downloads will come to a halt if eight servers hosted in Sweden happen to go offline.
Miro, the Internet TV player with a built in BitTorrent client released a new version today. LegalTorrents is now added as a default site, but users are of course free to add more sites or RSS feeds to get those latest TV-episodes on your computer seamlessly.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “Body of Lies” tops the chart this week. “Sex Drive” and “Changeling” remain in second and third place respectively.
