What is the right business model on the Internet? For the most part, organizations are still trying to find the balance between how to create value for consumers and a sustainable business model.

In case you haven’t noticed, media scarcity has for all intents and purposes disappeared. The Internet is essentially a giant copy machine that makes distribution of content frictionless. So, when you think about the web in these terms, then it makes it easy to understand why pay walls on the Internet do not work.

For example, take The Times of London, which recently implemented a pay wall. Last week, The Guardian reported that since instituting the pay wall The Times had lost 90 percent of its online traffic. The fact is the news that they are reporting is no longer scarce. Readers can easily find something similar (or even identical) on another competing website, or better they can find it on Twitter or a blog. The Times has created a model based on metering access, and in the process has lost eyeballs, which will almost certainly result in lost ad revenue.

As distribution costs reach effectively zero, we believe that there is value to be derived not in just access, but in creating an experience for users. In the future rich media will not have to be held under a lock and key to make money, which could result in a very different business model.

So, creators and organizations that are serious about making a business work on the Internet are looking to alternative media models – many of which fall under an umbrella you might loosely label freemium. The fact is that even with the shift from physical to digital media, the simple Economics 101 notion that consumers will pay for what is valuable and scarce still rings true.

We are partnering with various creators from filmmakers to gamers to software vendors – to enable relationships that bring value to the consumer, but allow the creator to build a business that works. These business models are largely based on this concept of freemium, where they leverage consumer adoption of values freely given to drive an opportunity for value to be captured later. We are still early in this process, but early results look very promising.

If you are interested in learning more about how freemium can be used as part of a business, I will be participating in a webinar with Mike Masnick of the popular blog Techdirt and Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote tomorrow at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET on the topic. Get the details here.

- Simon -

Today, Pioneer One, an original made for BitTorrent series, will debut on VODO.net (a BitTorrent Inc. partner). For those who are using Apps for µTorrent (or Project Griffin), the show can be downloaded from within the client via the VODO app. Also, for a limited time starting today, the pilot will be available with all fresh downloads of the µTorrent client.

Its creators, Josh Bernhard and Bracey Smith, are interested in making quality entertainment for large audiences outside the traditional network media business model. To accomplish this goal they are leveraging proven distribution channels on the Internet like BitTorrent to connect them with viewers. Such a release is significant because it highlights a shift in how content creators and publishers are reaching their audiences. At a time when the Internet has essentially driven media distribution costs to zero, BitTorrent provides an effective and flexible way to reach a large audience and can easily scale to meet demand.

This is part of the broader story of empowerment provided by the Internet to content creators. It is an example of creative new approaches where making money from rich media will not rely so heavily on holding media under lock and key. Content creators and publishers developing business models that are native to the digital domain are finding ways to build value that take advantage of all the strengths of the Internet. BitTorrent Inc. is working with partners like VODO to allow independent filmmakers to tune into the distribution potential of BitTorrent to reach millions of people within communities that might otherwise be inaccessible.

We are excited about the potential of new media models, and the opportunities they can generate for content creators and publishers who are looking to reach the masses. We believe that our work with partners like VODO will help broaden how content creators look at distribution and revenue models. We look forward to working with new partners, and are already working with a range of other organizations in ways that promise to contribute to their own digital native business models.

- Simon -

In our ever-connected world, users want the ability to control their torrents on the go anytime, anywhere. So, in a continued effort to make our products more accessible we are introducing µTorrent Web for iPhone. While µTorrent Web is currently only available as part of our experimental Project Falcon software, we continue to fill out the feature set prior to a large-scale rollout. With today’s introduction, users can now control their torrents from any computer or iPhone via their web browser.

In essence, µTorrent Web for iPhone is a mobile website that allows users to remotely access and control the µTorrent client that is installed on their computer. Before users can employ it on their iPhones they will need to make sure that they have the latest µTorrent client from Project Falcon installed on their computers, which can be found here: https://web.utorrent.com/. (The site also provides detailed instructions about how to download the client and setup remote access.)

After installing the software on a laptop or desktop computer and enabling µTorrent Web remote access, users should point their iPhone web browser to http://web.utorrent.com. At that point, they will be prompted to input their username and password and choose if they want to bookmark the application and add it to their home screen. In doing so, they will add an icon to their iPhone similar to if they had downloaded an app from the App Store. In addition to bookmarking the page, it is also recommended that users check “stay signed in” to ensure quick and easy accessibility in the future.

It is also worth noting that the mobile version offers the same privacy and zero-configuration secure web-access to uTorrent that users would get if you were signing on remotely via a PC. So, users can rest assured that no information about their µTorrent usage is ever exposed to BitTorrent Inc. or any third parties. (Read more about our privacy architecture.)

We are very excited about giving users remote access via their iPhones, and believe this is an important function to continue to make the µTorrent user experience even better.

- Simon -

No Seeders? Not Always the Case! How to Revive a “Dead” Torrent

Just because that hard to find torrent can’t seem to find any seeds to download from, does not necessarily mean that there are 0 seeders available in the entire world!

Seeders are very important users to you, as they are the users with a complete version of the file you are seeking. So it makes sense in desperate times to search additional trackers when you are having a hard time tracking down some seeders!

Here’s where adding trackers from our Tracker List come in handy. What this allows you to do is check other trackers (that were not included in your .torrent file) to see if anyone else has the same file to download.

This is a huge benefit as it can help you:

• Track down and increase seeder counts for a file that had none, so that you can begin downloading it
• Add to your current amount of seeders to increase overall download speeds

You must keep in mind, that this situation will arise pretty rarely and may not always work, but if you do find yourself having a tough time finding seeders it’s definitely worth a shot.

Here’s How!

Bittorrent / uTorrent

For Bittorrent 6.4 and uTorrent 2.0 alike you can click on the torrent you are downloading and then select the Trackers tab at the bottom, right-click and select Add Tracker.

As you can see by the image above, we are having a bit of a hard time finding seeds for our torrent…
In the next window, just add the trackers you want to add into the the trackers box and be sure to keep them separated by a line.

Hit OK, and you should see them added into your Trackers tab now, and your client should begin searching them.

And would you look at that! We’ve found some Seeders!

Deluge

In Delgue, once the torrent is loaded right-click on it and goto Edit Trackers. Once inside you are given the option to Add trackers. After you have added all the trackers you desire, right-click again on the torrent and select Update Tracker.

You can find a long list of trackers on our Tracker List page.
Happy Hunting! ?

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Recent coverage of uTP on the popular Torrentfreak blog yielded some interesting feedback in the comments section.

There are a couple of misconceptions that I’d like to address here:

First is the idea that we designed uTP *for* the ISPs. It was not.

While we think there are substantial advantages for ISPs in the broad adoption of uTP, the protocol was actually built from the start as a way to help consumers themselves. The fact remains that when using TCP, a poorly tuned BitTorrent client may well result in an internet connection that habitually gets congested and then drops packets, then recovers and repeats the process. This is not good for anyone.

The second misconception is that uTP will somehow slow uTorrent down. This is also not true. It will certainly result in less headaches for everyone and it may even speed things up.

Our design objectives were always to leave transfer rates unchanged, and we’re still confident this is achieveable. The fact that you don’t have to manually “manage” your client or limit it to some arbitrary % of your connection should mean that in practice it will be reliably faster. What’s more, we may actually be able to make it go faster than an unlimited TCP BitTorrent client. The way to picture this is to consider cars on a highway: you can only drive at 90 mph if there’s not much other traffic. But if there’s a lot of traffic then quickly the whole system will snarl up. uTP is designed to make clients transfer at an optimal speed *without* causing a snarl up. The thrill of speeding along at 90 mph is rather lost if you keep having to slow to a crawl until things recover. By avoiding this “stop/start” we felt that uTP *should* make things go faster overall.

Early evidence is starting to come out now from researchers at the University of Washington who are performing some independent tests on uTP performance. (These results are NOT conclusive at this point, but the early indications are quite good…)

From the first graph below you can see the interaction of uTP traffic (green) with some other application competing to use the connection (red). As expected, the uTP traffic backs off immediately and is replaced by traffic from the competing application – upon completion of the competing transfer, the uTP BitTorrent traffic quickly resumes. The blue data points represent the uTP traffic holding steady against the (right vertical axis) target delay of 100ms (I’d note this is vastly lower than anything achievable with TCP BitTorrent transfers).

The uTP controller is clearly doing its job, spotting a different application trying to use bandwidth and getting out of the way, only to recover just a fast.

But in many ways the more important graphs are the following…. These show you that uTP BitTorrent is just as fast as best-case TCP BitTorrent, and may even be faster…

Now one likely explanation for this is that the uTP overhead (a few % of the traffic which is not actual content) is included, but the TCP measurement excludes it. If this were true then probably uTP and TCP are almost identical.

But if we find that uTP traffic is indeed faster than TCP BitTorrent traffic, there are a couple of reasons why this slightly surprising conclusion might indeed be true –

Either the stop-start nature of TCP-based BitTorrent creates inefficiencies that are being optimized away using uTP.

Or else there were ISP network management measures in place which were discriminating against TCP-based BitTorrent.

Or possibly the UDP NAT-traversal techniques introduced along with uTP were resulting in far more good peers with uTP.

Or possibly something else?

Whatever the reason, this is early evidence that uTP is an even bigger win for consumers than anticipated, as well as being a positive contribution to ISPs.

Much more work remains to be done, but this is exactly the type of result we’re hoping to see more of.

–Simon–

We’ve spent a lot of time in recent posts talking about the benefits of µTP.  We’ve even talked a little bit about how it works here, though much more so in the various technical forums for the community.  But sometimes a picture is worth 2^^10 words and I think the graph below says it best.  µTP appears to be up to the task of reducing congestion.

These results are taken from our QA regression tests that we run on each new version of the client that ships with µTP.  The test is a simple one.  We use a DSL line here in the office and start a client seeding on that DSL line.  We then measure the latency seen by other applications, such as VoIP, online games and web browsing, that we run concurrently over the same link.  The graph above is a histogram of those latency samples.

The green samples were taken with a client seeding on TCP and the red samples were taken with a client seeding on uTP.  (You can tell that these are engineering graphs rather than marketing ones simply enough by the fact that GREEN= bad and RED = good, but you get the picture…).  In reading the graph, remember, queuing delay (latency) is a side effect of congestion.  More latency in this test means more congestion.

With the target latency set at 100ms, µTP does a pretty good job keeping the latency felt by the other applications near the target.  TCP clearly does not and more than congests the uplink.  In the process this ruins the network for all of the adjacent applications below.

While much work remains ahead of us (like picking the right target latency), it seems that µTP demonstrates some clear potential to alleviate network congestion wherever the network bottleneck happens to reside.  This has obvious benefits for users who will no longer congest themselves, benefits for publishers who want to use BitTorrent but also want to protect their brand when users seed content on their behalf, and benefits for ISPs who should see far fewer support issues with BitTorrent causing congestion and impacting other users on the network.

A win win win.

μTP or “micro-Transport Protocol” is a new protocol from BitTorrent, Inc. that is at the heart of the new major release of our popular BitTorrent clients “μTorrent” and “BitTorrent Mainline”. It is going to be available as the default transport mechanism in both μTorrent v2.0 and BitTorrent v7.0. So what’s the big deal? And why do we want this to be the centerpiece of our future software?

The fact is that our BitTorrent clients have become incredibly popular with users downloading large files over the internet. So much so that some observers claim that BitTorrent traffic accounts for 30%, 50%, or even more of all Internet traffic. Regardless of the actual numbers (which we have no way of knowing), it is clear that the popularity of BitTorrent is putting such a burden on ISP networks that they sometimes react by slowing down or interfering with that traffic.

Now there is a whole “net neutrality” debate, partly about whether ISPs should be allowed to interfere with internet traffic from one particular app simply because it is “too popular” – some argue that perhaps ISPs could invest more so that supply meets demand – but this debate is not the focus here. At BitTorrent we like to be a bit more pragmatic, to assert that there is responsibility on the part of both the ISPs and authors of popular applications like BitTorrent to make sure that the internet scales smoothly to meet demand.

Which brings us back to μTP:

News of μTP started to leak to the public late last year with some wild and totally untrue reporting that we were trying to make BitTorrent more greedy and were somehow “declaring war” on users of other applications. In fact completely the opposite is true, as was subsequently acknowledged by the initial author’s follow-up article.

μTP is a completely new implementation of the BitTorrent protocol with a major new design objective – μTP is designed to be network friendly – to not swamp network connections when there are other apps trying to send and receive – and to resolve the key problem that ISPs use to justify interference with BitTorrent traffic.

If BitTorrent traffic volume is so great that it overwhelms end-users’ connections (leading to service calls from consumers whose internet doesn’t work), then μTP eliminates this problem by being better at only using bandwidth when there is no other traffic competing, and automatically slowing or stopping BitTorrent transfers before network connections seize up.

Legacy BitTorrent traffic uses the standard internet “TCP” protocol to govern when it tries to go faster or slow down. The problem with TCP is that it can only detect a problem by waiting to see if packets are dropped. Unfortunately, by the time packets are being lost, the problem is already acute and the consumers connection has already drastically slowed or stopped. TCP is a lot like trying to drive with your eyes closed. You only notice something’s wrong when you hit something.

μTP is like driving with your eyes *open* – μTP is able to see problems coming and make much more modest adjustments to ensure the problems don’t cause a car wreck. It does this by being able to detect congestion on a network based on how long a packet takes to be sent from one peer to the next. If things start to take longer, then μTP adjusts the rate of sending accordingly.

As it happens, this trick has required some very deep engineering work – the way the client talks to other clients has had to be completely re-built. As a side effect, because the new protocol so different, it is practically invisible to some of the nasty traffic shaping techniques that some ISPs have been using. We doubt whether this happy result will last for long, and nor is it the point of the technology. The point is to reduce the need for such gear rather than to evade it.

Overall, when we get μTP stable, we’re excited about the potential benefits that this could bring to ISPs by reducing the effective burdens on their networks. Although we stand to gain nothing financially from them for implementing it, we hope to maintain the lead enjoyed by μTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline software as the most popular BitTorrent clients, and hopefully demonstrate how innovation from responsible stakeholders on a neutral internet can lead to winning outcomes all-around.

– Simon–