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| uTorrent Breaks 100 Million Monthly Users Posted: 17 Aug 2011 02:01 PM PDT
Over the years uTorrent’s target audience has also changed. BitTorrent was still a geek thing in 2005, but today its users include hockey moms, grandparents and many others who are not generally classified as computer experts. This wider appeal naturally translates into user growth. Today uTorrent's parent company BitTorrent Inc. confirmed to TorrentFreak that uTorrent has officially surpassed 100 million active users a month. By comparison, this is more active users than the much-hyped social network Twitter, and almost quadruple the number of users uTorrent had three years ago. “This is a big milestone for uTorrent and adds to what has been a tremendous year of growth for the client,” Shahi Ghanem, Chief Strategist at BitTorrent told TorrentFreak. We’re grateful for our users and we want to thank our global community for their amazing support. We take every bit of user feedback to heart when building uT and we remain committed to keeping it the world’s fastest and lightest BitTorrent client,” Ghanem added. Although the 100 million milestone is already quite an achievement, one of the main challenges in the future is to keep even more newcomers on board. Previously it was reported that hundreds of thousands of people download uTorrent every day, but that a significant percentage of this group don’t become regular users. To tackle this problem of “bouncing” users, uTorrent has made changes to its client in recent months that aim to keep more novices on board. An example is the "simplified view," allowing users to minimize parts of the uTorrent interface to focus attention on the most essential client features. And that’s just one of the many changes the company has made. Later this year will see another change in course for uTorrent as BitTorrent Inc. launches a paid version of the client. Branded “uTorrent Plus,” this version of uTorrent will come with several added features including the ability to convert videos and transfer files to external devices. More details on this project are expected to come out in the coming weeks. By reaching 100 million active monthly users the uTorrent brand is stronger than ever before. It is also an indication the BitTorrent’s popularity in general is still growing, despite fierce competition from direct download sites and streaming services. Indeed, BitTorrent is here to stay. Source: uTorrent Breaks 100 Million Monthly Users  |
| Economic Crisis Fuels Will They, Won’t They, Piracy Debate Posted: 17 Aug 2011 10:16 AM PDT Last week GigaOm’s co-editor Janko Roettgers published a piece in which he noted that the economic downturn has the potential to push some movie-buying customers beyond their financial limits. Instead of buying movies and TV shows, Janko mused, they might download them from unauthorized sources instead. Janko’s observation drew a rebuke from Alex Swartsel at the MPAA, who described it as the "casual promotion of the idea that stealing movies, TV shows and music is a perfectly acceptable way to save money”, and went on to equate copyright infringement to physical theft in conjunction with other common arguments. Both TorrentFreak and Mike Masnick at Techdirt responded to the MPAA’s comments and although we had very different approaches to the issue, we were in agreement – Janko hadn’t promoted illegal behavior of any kind. Today, Alex at the MPAA published a response which seemingly for the purposes of debate toys with the idea that that some people may well download content in an economic downturn. But if we rewind a few years, wasn’t it former MPAA chariman Dan Glickman making the same assertion – and meaning it? During the December 2008 forum held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Glickman was expressing concern, according to AFP, that piracy on the streets and online might increase in the near future. But what would drive this phenomenon? “If you look at the situation, the current economic crisis makes this problem much more serious than before,” he told the forum. “If we don’t protect IPR (intellectual property rights), our economic losses will be far worse.” Now, just a few years later, similar words from bloggers and journalists draw complaints from the MPAA that piracy is being “casually promoted”. Getting back to Alex Swartsel’s second post published today, instead of admitting that a link could exist between people’s piracy habits and their financial position, Swartsel continues to argue that people should not be inclined to pirate, ever. “Movie and TV theft is inevitable,” is a statement Alex can’t subscribe to. “Why? Because it's easy to steal something that, in physical form, exists only as data, and easy to justify stealing it as a result? Because information wants to be free, no matter the cost it took to produce or its creators' judgments about how best to disseminate it? Because anything is fair game once it's on the Internet?” Alex then goes on to pick Mike up on his point that the MPAA should “adapt and deal with reality.” In basic terms, with a couple of omissions, the “reality” can be found in the quote from Alex above. The Internet is a great big copying machine and yes, when something exists only as data it is ridiculously easy to copy and yes, some people will do that if they can. Information does want to be free and unfortunately the costs of creating that information, for the purposes of this debate, are simply irrelevant. The cost to the downloader is virtually nil and in the majority of cases, rightly or wrongly, the financial implications study will end right there. The MPAA obviously feel they have no choice but to try and stamp out piracy, and that is their prerogative, but they are facing a general public, as Mike Masnick points out, who feel that downloading movies and TV shows is socially acceptable. For this reason file-sharing of one form or another – for good or for ‘evil’ – isn’t going away and will continue to be the method of choice for a large number of Internet users to consume media. This is the “reality” and, to use the word that Alex won’t accept, it is indeed almost inevitable. However, the “reality” according to Alex is that there are "more options than ever before to get movies and TV shows online safely and legitimately – we have a list on MPAA.org here, and the creative minds in our industry are working on even more as we speak.” Well that’s good news indeed, since after trying more than a dozen of the provided links with my non-US IP address I couldn’t find a single one which would let me watch anything . The Pirate Bay, however, has no geo-lockout. Another uncomfortable ‘reality’. “But if what Masnick means is that we need to throw up our hands and look the other way while people who had nothing to do with making a movie or a TV show steal and profit from it, that is a reality to which we do not care to adapt, period,” Alex concludes. But of course Mike isn’t suggesting that nothing be done, he’s suggesting that what is currently being done to compete with piracy needs much more work. The reality here is that he’s absolutely right. The reality is that just about every movie and TV show, no matter how old or how new, is available to every internet user almost immediately and the studios don’t provide that service. Until they do piracy will continue, through this economic downturn and the next. Source: Economic Crisis Fuels Will They, Won’t They, Piracy Debate  |
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