9 ms·
The Inside Story of BitTorrent Inc’s Collapse
- newscracker 10y agoBitTorrent was, and is still, remarkable technology. Not focusing on the ethics and costs of piracy (that affects one part of what BitTorrent is used for), it has helped all kinds of content (entertainment and otherwise) have a massive reach globally (and across country borders) like nothing else has. I only feel sad for Bram Cohen in this whole series of events, and more so considering his condition (Asperger's syndrome) and how much he would've just put up with (in silent frustration) while others ran the show. In this article, I was surprised to see no mention of uTorrent, the BitTorrent client, and how it changed from the time it was bought by BitTorrent, Inc. P.S.: Off topic, but I dislike these Medium hosted sites with large blurry images on page load that come into focus later.
- LeoPanthera 10y agoVery clickbaity title. This refers to BitTorrent Inc, the company, not the file sharing protocol.
- draw_down 10y agoWell, that's probably why it says "BitTorrent Inc" in the title?
- kbrackbill 10y agoThe original title was "Unbelievable story of how BitTorrent failed"
- MichaelBurge 10y ago"Unbelievable story of how BitTorrent Failed" was the title a few moments ago.
- sctb 10y agoThanks. We've updated the title from “Unbelievable story of how BitTorrent failed”.
- fieryskiff 10y agoMeta, but did backchannel change the title, or did the submitter? It seems like a weird editorilization, from the current "The Inside Story of BitTorrent’s Bizarre Collapse". "Unbelievable story of..." feels very click-bait to me.
- grzm 10y agoBackchannel could have changed the title, wouldn't be the first time a title's been changed somwhere. The URI includes "the-inside-story-of-bittorrents-bizarre-collapse" which makes me believe otherwise however, unless they've been flip-flopping the title, or A/B testing.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Scaevolus 10y agoI wonder what's happening with Bittorrent Live. Maybe the economies of scale of the large companies have made P2P streaming a hard sell? Why install a weird temperamental app when you can just stream video from Twitch (Amazon) or YouTube or Facebook? They've all invested tens of billions in networking infrastructure and have the necessary advertising structures to recoup the costs.
- wmf 10y agoThe economics have definitely changed. CDNs are dirt cheap and are technically simpler and more reliable than P2P. And for live video you probably want transcoding which is also easier to do in the cloud.
- lucasgonze 10y agoAs former eng lead at a live streaming company, I second the idea that transcoding is a big deal. Streaming bandwidth is super pricey, and the money is enough to really matter. Even a startup can easily get to five or six figure expenses. Bittorrent Live gets that right. However transcoding is critical, given that every OS and browser has its own format quirks. BT Live can't remotely do this. Check out Zencoder for the real competition. Maybe BT Live will find a niche with use cases that just produce no money at all, or where servers get shut down for political reasons. Marches, samizdat, and, uh, questionable copyright.
- wmf 10y agoTwitter is trying to claim the political niche but maybe BT Live can become the home of "too hot for Twitter" streaming. On a personal note, it's great to see the old decentralization crew on this thread.
- evgen 10y agoLucas and Wes talking p2p and Bram, I think I woke up this morning in '99...
- 10y ago
- empath75 10y agoBittorrent is an amazing protocol, but it seemed like creating a 'Bittorrent' company is like trying to start an "Http" company.
- api 10y agoThey should have picked one single niche application for BitTorrent and built a killer product around that.
- criddell 10y agoIsn't that what ThePirateBay.org did?
- sp332 10y agoThey didn't really try to control the protocol development like BitTorrent did though. They didn't even have their own client.
- wmf 10y agoIt sounds like they tried that multiple times and they all failed.
- api 10y agoI'm not sure about that. A lot of what I've read about sounds like they were chasing Netflix with a lot of cash but no idea how to compete. The article mentions that big cos are using BitTorrent for cluster upgrades. There's a lot of cash in enterprise networking. BitTorrent is basically a large blob multicast protocol. BitTorrent Sync was a decent product too. What would have happened had they put $30 mil behind a push to take sync from Dropbox and Box instead of sidelining it? Seems like they spun out the best contender they had. It'd be funny if the spinoff succeeds.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoIt could be the classic situation of FOSS. They had a product people would've paid for if sold on its advantages. They gave it away for free. It got picked up by tons of freeloaders. With free version out & good enough, they weren't able to figure out how to make money off it. Messed themselves up.
- WorldMaker 10y agoI had been wondering a bit about the reason for the BitTorrent / Resilio split and this article did a decent job painting some of the picture.
- a_brawling_boo 10y agoOne good thing that came out of the disappointment of bittorrent inc is the open source syncthing which I believe was inspired by bittorrent sync's failings.
- m-p-3 10y agoI'm glad it exists, but it's definitely not as intuitive to set up.
- btgeekboy 10y agoI wish they would improve the story around the official distributions. I'm attempting to migrate away from an aging, single user, files-only OwnCloud instance to Syncthing, and the end user client is not nearly as painless. Syncthing distributes CLI binaries for a bunch of platforms, which is great. But there's no unified GUI for end users that's officially sanctioned. Instead, there's a bunch of 3rd party repos that one hopes they can trust. And, glaringly, zero iOS clients. (I'm working around this by adding a WebDAV server to my always-on system, but it's a workaround for sure.)
- orasis 10y agoBitTorrent Inc was ethically shady from day one. Call me old-fashioned, but the investors got what they deserved by trying to profit off of piracy while pretending to be legitimate.
- NelsonMinar 10y agoWhat a crazy twist for a startup that was doomed from the start. But the article doesn't really do a good job explaining how Johnson and Delamar were given control of the company. I get that Accel wanted out, but why just hand it over to a couple of bros with a plausible plan? I feel like there had to be deeper relationships involved, or else one hell of a pitch deck.
- FatCalico 10y agoKlinker vouched for them. He called Jeremy Johnson a "product visionary". Then as quid pro quo, BitTorrent (with Delamar and Johnson in control) funded Klinker's Resilio spin out (to the tune of about $5M of BitTorrent's cash). Oh yes, BitTorrent is still paying Klinker his CEO salary even to this day. Normally the BitTorrent's general counsel would have objected to all this but Klinker (the CEO) and BitTorrent's long time general counsel are married to one another. How the board ever allowed the CEO to hire his wife as general counsel is totally bewildering.
- NelsonMinar 10y agoWell that's fascinating innuendo. I'm not equipped to evaluate if it's true, but it makes sense. I wonder how the other equity owners feel about the outcome.
- loader 10y agoWhenever I read stories that involve guys like these that come in swinging and think they can change things and end up just spending everyone's money, I've always wanted to label this behavior and you got me thinking ... "Broxecutives".
- mr_spothawk 10y agobt television is sorta sweet.
- mr_spothawk 10y agowhat the hell is "one America news"?
- conradev 10y agoI wish BitTorrent Live was made open source. There are a number of companies working on "P2P CDNs" for live streaming[1][2][3], but all of their work is proprietary. The companies' sales pitches are usually around efficiency: it allows providers to pay for less CDN capacity. I'm more interested in the decentralization aspect. It makes live streams hard to censor and easy to distribute. The closest open source equivalent we have is PPSPP (Peer-to-Peer Streaming Peer Protocol), or RFC 7574[4]. Unfortunately, the reference implementation, libswift[5], was seemingly abandoned a few years ago. In addition, PPSPP only deals with a stream of bytes, and while it was made with video in mind there is no implementation that handles video well: making different swarms for different quality levels, intelligent chunking, perhaps even deterministic encoding[6]. [1] https://www.peer5.com https://www.peer5.com [2] https://viblast.com/pdn/ https://viblast.com/pdn/ [3] https://www.streamroot.io https://www.streamroot.io [4] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7574 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7574 [5] https://github.com/libswift/libswift/blob/devel/TODO https://github.com/libswift/libswift/blob/devel/TODO [6] http://www.ndsl.kaist.edu/~kyoungsoo/papers/mmsys14.pdf http://www.ndsl.kaist.edu/~kyoungsoo/papers/mmsys14.pdf
- vmrob 10y agoI'm actually an engineer on the BitTorrent Live product and we definitely hear that desire. While we can't exactly open source the protocol itself, some of the libraries we've developed are currently freely available under permissive licenses. If you're interested in the tech and want to read some related stuff, we're hosting an engineering blog over at https://blog.btlive.io/ https://blog.btlive.io/. https://github.com/bittorrent/scraps https://github.com/bittorrent/scraps https://github.com/bittorrent/simon https://github.com/bittorrent/simon https://github.com/bittorrent/live-build-environments/ https://github.com/bittorrent/live-build-environments/
- vmrob 10y agoAnd just recently, the UI framework we wrote for BitTorrent Live: https://github.com/bittorrent/okui https://github.com/bittorrent/okui
- hackerboos 10y ago
- riter 10y agoI used to know and work with Delamar at a startup but for the music industry and ringtones... also, with similar concluding results. SMH.
- berry_sortoro 10y agoNo matter that I hate the uTorrent client and its shady practices. Wasn't is shipped with a bitcoin miner at some point? Filled with (shady) ads ... not open source. I mean I don't get why people use this horrible thing when there is qBittorrent (and others) with pretty much the same interface without all the bad stuff, fully open source, multi platform. They actually released uTorrent close source for linux. I do not get it with 10+ great clients that are actually open there is no need at all. No matter what happens in or with this company, Brian Cohen is a hero for what he done and that he in fact not cached in on it but rather open sourced the protocol. For me its unbelievable how a company actually can have a business model like that. But then OK people on the net are just stupid, they roll with the official client for the only reason that its official not even looking any further. Throw a few shady practices in and you get some money generated by the people watching shady ads while downloading their stuff.
- wnevets 10y agoWeren't they the ones to buy the beloved uTorrent client and ruined it with adware?
- swang 10y agoso let me get this straight: receive controlling interest of a company with $33million in cash reserves by using a $10million promisory note to gain shares. proceed to spend $18million in cash, some of which is spent to pay your buddies. when time comes to pay $10million promisory note, shrug your shoulders, and no actual penalties are involved for not paying up. am i missing something? sounds like a great scam.
- rasz_pl 10y agohow does buying 500Mil chain of stores with its own cash reserves sound to you then? https://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/dick-smith-is-the-greatest-private-equity-heist-of-all-time/ https://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/dick-smith-is-the-grea...
- will_hughes 10y agoFor those not aware of the current situation: Dick Smith Electronics went bankrupt about 12 months after this article. They were like the Tandy or Radioshack of Australia at first, and followed a similar path - killing off their electronics hobbyist roots, and became pretty much a generic consumer electronics store.
- shmerl 10y agoKind of a similar story happened to Diaspora Inc. It didn't manage to become a product or a company. But technology was good and open and it lives on today.
- discardorama 10y agoFor some reason, this reminded me of "Pied Piper" of "Silicon Valley" fame.
- touristtam 10y agoPretty much. Let's hope the next season doesn't develop in such a dreaful way.
- vcool07 10y agoI think it would've worked if they had started off in a SAAS model, like, pay $1 for exchanging 1GB of data, $10 for 10GB of data and so on. At the time it launched there was still requirement for moving data across sites , but no reliable way. For ex: most software/trailware/shareware came in CD ROMS bundled in magazines !