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

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.

Comments

Oh joy.

[Chas]

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

NO THANKS!

Re:Oh joy.

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Oh joy.

[Highdude702]

im retarded never mind that. i was thinking RUtorrent. which is what I was talking about. Please mod my post above as idiotic and incorrect. Thank you!

Re:Oh joy.

[kelemvor4]

Actually, apparently you have never used it. Its an ad-less client that can be setup for remote access across all platforms. It's one of the best available, only to be beaten by deluge in my opinion. I'ts not our fault that you choose to use shitty software without looking around. Some of the best most useful software I've ever used has been free OSS. Just have to google a little bit to find good shit, the good stuff wont always be on the first page.

WTF are you talking about? uTorrent is full of ads.

Re:Oh joy.

[Anonymous Coward]

uTorrent 2.2.1.25302 was the last usable version, before the development team shit the bed.

Re:Oh joy.

[thegarbz]

Sounds like you haven't updated your client in about 7 years. uTorrent is an laden malware shoveling auto updating piece of shit. It was once an awesome client, but people moved to the bloated garbage of azure or whatever it was called just to escape. And that's saying a lot.

If I owned it

[thegarbz]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:If I owned it

[dinfinity]

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). The only big downside is that it is not open source, which is why I keep an eye on qBittorrent.
Tixati has a terrible quite oldfashioned website, but it is worth checking out: https://www.tixati.com/discove...

Too Late?

[Voyager529]

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.

Re:Too Late?

[beckett]

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 comprise the long tail catalogue of filez on both public and private sites.

Re:Too Late?

[Kjella]

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? Then again, looking at my peer logs a lot of other people use it (and by far most use 3.4.9), so I guess they have an audience. Whether they have one that'll let itself be monetized, well... whatever. There's plenty good alternatives if they get intrusive or obnoxious.

Re:Too Late?

[gitano_dbs]

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

Let the crappy adware die

[Anonymous Coward]

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

BitTorrent Live: wasted potential

[Guspaz]

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.

Re:

[dgaller]

Bad publicity having nothing to do with the BTC miner they tried to slip in.

pile of shit

[gravewax]

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

Who's still even using it?

[joshuaf]

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?

Peaked with uTorrent 2.2.1

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

uTorrent 2.2.1 = perfection, and continues to work to this day.