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Businesses Piracy Entertainment

BitTorrent To Refocus On What Made It Rich - uTorrent (torrentfreak.com) 54

Best known for its uTorrent client, BitTorrent Inc has been focusing more on other projects for a while. But now, with another shake-up imminent, the company has made a fresh commitment to focus on uTorrent and Mainline clients. From an article on TorrentFreak: Caught between the bad publicity generated by millions of pirates using the software for less than legal activities, a reliance on its huge revenue, plus its role in distributing content from signed-up artists, BitTorrent Inc. has at times been required to delicately maneuver around the client's very existence. Now, however, that might be about to change. According to a report from Variety, changes are underway at BitTorrent Inc that could see uTorrent and its Mainline sister client come back into the limelight. First up, the company has yet another new CEO. Rogelio Choy joins the company after spending two years at parking service Luxe Valet. However, Choy is also a former BitTorrent employee, serving as its Chief Operating Officer between 2012 and 2015. The hiring of Choy reportedly coincides with a shake-up of BitTorrent Inc.'s product line. BitTorrent Live, the patented live video streaming project developed by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen, will be set loose as a separate, venture-funded company, Variety reports.
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BitTorrent To Refocus On What Made It Rich - uTorrent

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  • Oh joy. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @03:06PM (#54129875) Homepage Journal

    So we can have another compromised ad-whoring torrent program to fuck our systems up with.

    NO THANKS!

    • Re:Oh joy. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @03:17PM (#54129987)

      So we can have another compromised ad-whoring torrent program to fuck our systems up with.

      NO THANKS!

      This isn't the Windows 10 thread!

  • If I owned it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @03:09PM (#54129899)

    I would kill it with fire, scrub the name from the internet, and ensure copies of that once great client turned horrendous chugging piece of malware shit never surface again.

    The best thing BitTorrent Inc could do is forget it ever bought uTorrent and then release the uTorrent version that predated the purchase. What an upgrade that would be.

    • Re:If I owned it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @03:20PM (#54130013)

      It's a mystery to me why anyone is still using uTorrent when qBittorrent is so much better.

      It offers the experience that uTorrent used to be fore it was completely destroyed, with the added benefit that it's also cross-platform.

      • why anyone is still using uTorrent when qBittorrent is so much better.

        Because it isn't, last time I checked.

        I install qBittorrent about once every six months, then uninstall it again because it just doesn't do what I want it to do (specifically in terms of the interface and its handling of RSS feeds). I actually kept it installed for a while before what.cd died, specifically because it was whitelisted there.

        Tixati however has proven to be the client for me as it is very much power-user oriented, GUI-wise not Spartan but also not bloated (comparable to foobar2000 in my opinion

        • by Kjella ( 173770 )

          I install qBittorrent about once every six months, then uninstall it again because it just doesn't do what I want it to do (specifically in terms of the interface and its handling of RSS feeds). I actually kept it installed for a while before what.cd died, specifically because it was whitelisted there.

          May I ask what you feel is missing? It got an RSS feed reader, you can set up automatic download filters - simple and regex, pick what feeds each rule applies to, you can set quite a few other options for your RSS downloads than your regular downloads. I see it doesn't really have a smart filter to prevent multiple versions of the same episode from getting downloaded, but usually I just amend the filter until there's only one version in practice.

          • IIRC, the issue was that it did not provide a usable interface to use the RSS feeds without auto-downloading.

            I dislike auto-downloading, because I like to make varying choices about which release of an episode I'd like to see. Some releases have incorrect framerates or are otherwise of low quality, but if that release is the only one available when I want to watch the episode, then so be it. I really don't want to battle with programming an auto-downloader when eyeballing the right choice out of maybe 6 opt

      • I moved to deluge myself. Extra bonus is the client server model allows me to run it on a headless server.

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        It's a mystery to me why anyone is still using uTorrent when qBittorrent is so much better.

        This.

        I switched to qBitTorrent years ago and haven't looked back.

        My current mission is to find a nag free anti-virus that doesn't install all and sundry into every browser, nook and cranny it can.

  • Too Late? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529@yahoo. c o m> on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @03:12PM (#54129929)

    When "2.2.1" is one of the Google Autocomplete terms for "utorrent", it basically sums up the fact that uTorrent was 'done' at about that time. Meanwhile, uTorrent qBittorrent and Transmission have nearly all the same features, and seedbox providers have more-or-less standardized on rTorrent/ruTorrent (RIP Torrentflux).

    What is going to make the next version of uTorrent preferable to what's already there? I'm thinking that uTorrent's best days are behind it, and as long as 2.2.1 lives on Oldversion or OldApps, that is its legacy.

    • by beckett ( 27524 )

      seedbox providers have more-or-less standardized on rTorrent/ruTorrent (RIP Torrentflux). What is going to make the next version of uTorrent preferable to what's already there?

      I guess this product's not for you, and the <<1% of torrenters that are in the market for seedboxes.

      for the vast majority of torrent users, they're going to continue to use utorrent on their desktop at home, and they're going to find their torrent client by googling it, and continue to torrent on public sites. Don't need to thumb your nose at those users either, because it's the huge, cheap, local hard drives in all those home computers with crappy connections, running shitty utorrent that compri

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      What is going to make the next version of uTorrent preferable to what's already there? I'm thinking that uTorrent's best days are behind it, and as long as 2.2.1 lives on Oldversion or OldApps, that is its legacy.

      That's what I'm thinking too, I switched to qBittorrent that is open source and... it's done? Or well I see there's lots of tiny little enhancements and bugfixes in the release notes but honestly I can't think of a single noticeable change in the last couple years... nor any that I'd want, really. They'd have to pull off some entirely new non-torrent downloading functionality out of the hat to make me go back to uTorrent, which then begs the question.... why is it mixed up with uTorrent in the first place?

    • The 2.2.1 version its from 2011, not really that "old". The next versions all crippled it on ADDs whitout adding real features.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @03:12PM (#54129933)

    A one-time great, lightweight client compromised to the depths of hell by its corporate masters. Let it die.

  • by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @03:18PM (#54130005)

    BitTorrent was so successful because it was an open system: an open standard with a public domain reference implementation. Anybody could use it, anybody could write a client for it.

    BitTorrent Live failed because it was a closed system: a proprietary standard, a super clunky closed-source client, and a closed system that only allows a very small amount of curated content.

    If BitTorrent Live had been as open as the original protocol, or at least free and open for non-commercial use, it could have been revolutionary, and put the power of video streaming back in the hands of individual users. BitTorrent (the company) could then have earned revenue by producing their own client or licensing the technology for commercial use. Instead, it's a flop that was dead-on-arrival.

  • by dgaller ( 849242 )
    Bad publicity having nothing to do with the BTC miner they tried to slip in.
  • BitTorrent Inc bought the uTorrent client and utterly ruined it after it was already extremely popular. It was not developed in-house. This is important background information that should have been mentioned in the OP.

    BitTorrent's original (mainline) client was very barebones and lightweight, with few features. One of the primary reasons BitTorrent took off and gained incredible success as a protocol was the widespread development of 3rd party clients around the basic protocol. uTorrent was one of the first

  • pile of shit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gravewax ( 4772409 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @03:49PM (#54130263)
    uTorrent went from being my favourite app to being a Ad pushing bucket of shit. I won't touch it again, they lost my trust and loyalty and I don't think there is anything they can do to get it back. currently using qBittorrent, fast, easy, full featured and ad fucking free
  • Don't knock 'em--even assholes have a function...

  • Hasn't everybody moved onto qbittorrent by now anyway? Kind of late to focus on utorrent, didn't most people ditch it a long time ago for something better?
  • by WhoBeDaPlaya ( 984958 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @05:19PM (#54130987) Homepage
    uTorrent 2.2.1 = perfection, and continues to work to this day.
    • by jbrizz ( 2449526 )
      It doesn't handle a fast connection very well though. I tried a lot of clients but settled on Transmission (Linux) as the one that best handled my 1000/500 connection. Anything libtorrent was the slowest, too CPU hungry, and utorrented seemed to thrash the disks too much.
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