BitTorrent is Shutting Down Its Live TV Streaming Service

Janko Roettgers, reporting for Variety: San Francisco-based BitTorrent Inc. is set to shut down its P2P-powered live TV streaming service BitTorrent Live in the coming weeks, Variety has learned. Most of the 10-person team behind the live streaming service is expected to leave the company by the end of this week. The closure of Live comes after BitTorrent unsuccessfully tried to raise money to spin out the service into a separate company. It's also just the latest twist in a long corporate drama. Last year, two outside investors took control of BitTorrent, spent millions of dollars on an expensive expansion into the media space and promptly got themselves fired. BitTorrent has since rehired its former COO Rogelio Choy as its new CEO, and is now looking to focus on its core products. As part of that realignment, the company was looking to turn Live into a separate, venture-funded entity, but raising money for it proved challenging.

Was it being used?

[tomservo84]

I guess the REAL question is...was this service even being used at all? I admit I'd not heard of it before. Oh, and...first post. :)

Monetize.

[HornWumpus]

They needed a way to monetize it.

Detect common commercials and insert your own over them.

How do 'investors' get fired? Were they morons who got no control for their investment?

Re:

[OffaMyLawn]

How do 'investors' get fired? Were they morons who got no control for their investment?

Thank you. That question has also been rattling around in my head.

The best I could do was to stumble upon this [backchannel.com] which states that it appears they gave the money back to the investors, essentially just kicking them out. Would make sense since it does appear that they were just causing the company to hemorrhage money.

I know we all hate ads but...

[ArhcAngel]

Did this ever get advertised anywhere? I have never heard of it. I suspect it was covered at /. but I guess I missed it. It's hard to grow a business if your target demographic doesn't know about it.

Re:

[Tx]

I hadn't heard of it either, so I don't even know if we are their target demographic or not. But from TFA, it sounds like something pretty much guaranteed to fail in any case. It sounds like they were trying to create a pay streaming service, i.e. competing with Netflix and Amazon, with the sole technical advantage being their p2p technology. The problem with that is that a) content is king, and they wouldn't have deep enough pockets to buy or create enough content to get a foot in the door, and b) the p2p

Re:

[ArhcAngel]

I don't even see p2p as an advantage over Netflix. Netflix has it's own CDN [netflix.com] (Content Delivery Network) on just about every ISP's last mile so there isn't a bottleneck coming from Netflix. With p2p you could be pulling data from anywhere on earth depending on how many sources are available.

Re:

[GNious]

Did this ever get advertised anywhere? I have never heard of it. I suspect it was covered at /. but I guess I missed it. .

Well, it's been covered a fair bit here on /., so perhaps you never hearing about it is more about you than Bittorrent Live? :p

BitTorrent has Live TV Streaming?

[hackel]

News to me. Can't say I'm surprised it's getting shut down!

I honestly don't understand how anything live could be transmitted via BitTorrent in the first place. Unless it's some kind of deviation from the standard protocol that forces all the parts to be in order? Seems like it would still be substantially delayed from "live."

Great Service

[john3245]

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