BitTorrent to Appear in Electronics

By Ed Oswald | Published October 23, 2006, 1:01 PM

BitTorrent continued its efforts to separate itself from its illicit file-sharing roots by announcing a new initiative to incorporate the technology into consumer electronic products. ASUS, Planex, and QNAP are among the first companies to license the technology.

The BitTorrent download manager would be integrated into devices, allowing content to be retrieved, stored and played back. Products including routers, media servers, and network attached storage devices would incorporate the technology.

Having such products would negate the need for a PC to download content, BitTorrent says. The company points to the growing amount of legitimate content on the service that makes such an offering a worthwhile option to manufacturers.

"While already synonymous with efficient file delivery, BitTorrent is extending our reach beyond the PC and into a number of products and services to further strengthen the bridge between content and devices," president and co-founder Ashwin Navin said.

Parks Associates analyst Harry Wang says that integrating content delivery options into consumer electronics is becoming increasingly important. The group estimates some 30 million households will have an entertainment network by 2010.

"To move beyond the early-adopter stage, CE manufacturers must ally with content and service providers, software developers and silicon designers to build elegance and usability into the product design and bring popular digital content to consumers' fingertips anywhere in the home," Wang said.

Comments

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one thing to point out is that bt kills your throughput since your gateway is handling a lot of connections. Be nice if isps provided more robust hardware that handles more simultaneous connections. I can't stand how it can clog up the pipes from time to time.

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I think the problem with this is ISP's have been throttling the BitTorrent ports for years. How effective is this going to be, even with the encryption setting on?

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No they haven't. There's no default BT port anyway, everyone just sets it to whatever and/or clients use UPNP to map a random port each time.

Oh and BT hasn't even been around for "years."

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Oh and BT hasn't even been around for "years."
Well, I have been using it for years. (At least 3 years, probably more...and I was late to the party.)

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He apparentley hasn't been around for "years".

*grins*

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You weren't late, it did get going in 2003. I been using it since then around too, dunno, just didn't feel that long.

But ISPs certainly haven't been blocking it since then when right now there's even no real way of blocking it.

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But ISPs certainly haven't been blocking it since then when right now there's even no real way of blocking it.
They have been trying to block it for over two years now (http://forums.degreez.net/viewtopic.php?t=1531); but like you said, its not really all that possible.

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BT is 5 years old.

I cannot remember when I first started using BT, was some time between 02 & 03. I do remember when the Experimental BT client came out, which was early '03, and i remember switching to it.

History Of BT:
http://www.wired.com/wir...e/13.01/bittorrent.html

BT is susceptible to packet shaping, which is why encryption was added.

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The BitTorrent download manager would be integrated into devices, allowing content to be retrieved, stored and played back. Products including routers, media servers, and network attached storage devices would incorporate the technology.
Umm, it already has been.
http://www.newegg.com/Pr...sp?Item=N82E16822107001]
I've been looking at buying this for a couple of months now.

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Yeah, I noticed this too. Seems like a pretty nice bit of hardware with a lot of functionality crammed into such a small space.

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