The Inside Story of BitTorrent Inc’s Collapse

I wish BitTorrent Live was made open source. There are a number of companies working on &quot;P2P CDNs&quot; for live streaming[1][2][3], but all of their work is proprietary. The companies&#x27; sales pitches are usually around efficiency: it allows providers to pay for less CDN capacity.<p>I&#x27;m more interested in the decentralization aspect. It makes live streams hard to censor and easy to distribute.<p>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].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peer5.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peer5.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;viblast.com&#x2F;pdn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;viblast.com&#x2F;pdn&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.streamroot.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.streamroot.io</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc7574" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc7574</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;libswift&#x2F;libswift&#x2F;blob&#x2F;devel&#x2F;TODO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;libswift&#x2F;libswift&#x2F;blob&#x2F;devel&#x2F;TODO</a><p>[6] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ndsl.kaist.edu&#x2F;~kyoungsoo&#x2F;papers&#x2F;mmsys14.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ndsl.kaist.edu&#x2F;~kyoungsoo&#x2F;papers&#x2F;mmsys14.pdf</a>

Bittorrent is an amazing protocol, but it seemed like creating a &#x27;Bittorrent&#x27; company is like trying to start an &quot;Http&quot; company.

so let me get this straight:<p>receive controlling interest of a company with $33million in cash reserves by using a $10million promisory note to gain shares.<p>proceed to spend $18million in cash, some of which is spent to pay your buddies.<p>when time comes to pay $10million promisory note, shrug your shoulders, and no actual penalties are involved for not paying up.<p>am i missing something? sounds like a great scam.

One good thing that came out of the disappointment of bittorrent inc is the open source syncthing which I believe was inspired by bittorrent sync&#x27;s failings.

What a crazy twist for a startup that was doomed from the start. But the article doesn&#x27;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.

I had been wondering a bit about the reason for the BitTorrent &#x2F; Resilio split and this article did a decent job painting some of the picture.

For some reason, this reminded me of &quot;Pied Piper&quot; of &quot;Silicon Valley&quot; fame.

I wonder what&#x27;s happening with Bittorrent Live. Maybe the economies of scale of the large companies have made P2P streaming a hard sell?<p>Why install a weird temperamental app when you can just stream video from Twitch (Amazon) or YouTube or Facebook? They&#x27;ve all invested tens of billions in networking infrastructure and have the necessary advertising structures to recoup the costs.

I used to know and work with Delamar at a startup but for the music industry and ringtones... also, with similar concluding results. SMH.

BitTorrent 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&#x27;s syndrome) and how much he would&#x27;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>P.S.: Off topic, but I dislike these Medium hosted sites with large blurry images on page load that come into focus later.

Weren&#x27;t they the ones to buy the beloved uTorrent client and ruined it with adware?

I think it would&#x27;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&#x2F;trailware&#x2F;shareware came in CD ROMS bundled in magazines !

Kind of a similar story happened to Diaspora Inc. It didn&#x27;t manage to become a product or a company. But technology was good and open and it lives on today.

bt television is sorta sweet.

Very clickbaity title. This refers to BitTorrent Inc, the company, not the file sharing protocol.

Meta, but did backchannel change the title, or did the submitter? It seems like a weird editorilization, from the current &quot;The Inside Story of BitTorrent’s Bizarre Collapse&quot;.<p>&quot;Unbelievable story of...&quot; feels very click-bait to me.

BitTorrent 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.