TorrentFreak

uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. reports that the new advertising option in the popular BitTorrent client generates billions of ad impressions per month. Although users initially revolted against the idea of making uTorrent ad-supported, the new stats show that not too many of them turned the feature off. The next challenge for BitTorrent Inc. is to attract premium advertisers in addition to the lower tier poker and PC performance ads that are showing up now.

The first ever certified BitTorrent Android box goes on sale today, allowing users to stream files downloaded with uTorrent wirelessly to their television. The new set-top box supports playback of all popular video formats and can also download torrents by itself, fully anonymously if needed.

This week uTorrent 3.2.2 was released to the public and one of the release highlights are the new advertisements present in the client. BitTorrent Inc. hopes that these ads will bring in extra revenue so the company can continue to invest in the future of distributed technology. When the advertising initiative was first announced no opt-out was offered, but thanks to user feedback there now is an advanced feature to disable the ads.

A backlash among Reddit users has seen BitTorrent Inc. criticized over the way revenue-generating addons were presented in parallel with uTorrent client downloads. The company informs TorrentFreak that it always considers feedback, aims to provide a good customer experience, and will introduce changes soon. But whatever they are, is it really possible to please all of the people all of the time, especially ones whose requirements are “no-strings free” at all times?

When it comes to BitTorrent clients, uTorrent is the most popular one around. Tips and tricks are always welcome and today we have a selection straight from the guys at BitTorrent Inc., including an exclusive peek at a new money saving feature set to appear in uTorrent Android.

Downloading files via BitTorrent is about as public as file-sharing gets, and it’s safe to say that most popular BitTorrent swarms are being monitored one way or the other. To protect the privacy of its users BitTorrent Inc. therefore decided to randomize the peer-id uTorrent users display to other peers and the tracker. While the new feature makes it more difficult to track the download habits of individual users, IP-addresses still remain public and trackable.

BitTorrent Inc. released a native uTorrent client for Android smartphones and tablet computers today. This is the first official BitTorrent client released by the uTorrent team that works on mobile devices, a relatively underserved market of BitTorrent users. The new release allows users to search for torrents online, download files directly to any Android device, and supports RSS feeds.