
The Inside Story of BitTorrent Inc’s Collapse - steven
https://backchannel.com/the-inside-story-of-bittorrents-bizarre-collapse-a0766a5442d7#---199-286.jihd0r4lo
======
conradev
I wish BitTorrent Live was made open source. There are a number of companies
working on "P2P CDNs" for live streaming[1][2][3], but all of their work is
proprietary. The companies' sales pitches are usually around efficiency: it
allows providers to pay for less CDN capacity.

I'm more interested in the decentralization aspect. It makes live streams hard
to censor and easy to distribute.

The closest open source equivalent we have is PPSPP (Peer-to-Peer Streaming
Peer Protocol), or RFC 7574[4]. Unfortunately, the reference implementation,
libswift[5], was seemingly abandoned a few years ago. In addition, PPSPP only
deals with a stream of bytes, and while it was made with video in mind there
is no implementation that handles video well: making different swarms for
different quality levels, intelligent chunking, perhaps even deterministic
encoding[6].

[1] [https://www.peer5.com](https://www.peer5.com)

[2] [https://viblast.com/pdn/](https://viblast.com/pdn/)

[3] [https://www.streamroot.io](https://www.streamroot.io)

[4] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7574](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7574)

[5]
[https://github.com/libswift/libswift/blob/devel/TODO](https://github.com/libswift/libswift/blob/devel/TODO)

[6]
[http://www.ndsl.kaist.edu/~kyoungsoo/papers/mmsys14.pdf](http://www.ndsl.kaist.edu/~kyoungsoo/papers/mmsys14.pdf)

~~~
hackerboos
It's not just P2P-CDNs it's all live streaming video, HLS and MPEG-DASH. Open
source tools for these technologies are sparse.

Even good HTML5 players that match YouTube's feature set are few and far
between.

Bitorrent Live is excellent btw. One of the best performing video apps on iOS.

~~~
_sieh
I think this may be because:

\- Doing adaptive bitrate like YouTube does means doing many transcodes.

\- Transcoding is either extremely CPU intensive, bandwidth heavy or low
quality.

\- Transcoding in realtime requires further compromise on the above, to the
point where distributing the transcode over multiple machines is necessary.

\- There doesn't seem to be an agreed upon, browser supported protocol for
live DASH. Static is easy enough but live is more difficult, especially when
you add seeking, pausing etc.

\- The above means you need both a backend and a frontend system.

\- Running a system like this is very expensive. The entities interested in
running it and able to do so are usually willing to pay for it.

All this said, Emby[0] can stream a transcode and perhaps its stack would be a
good place to start.

[0]: [https://emby.media](https://emby.media)

------
empath75
Bittorrent is an amazing protocol, but it seemed like creating a 'Bittorrent'
company is like trying to start an "Http" company.

~~~
api
They should have picked one single niche application for BitTorrent and built
a killer product around that.

~~~
orasis
Peer-to-peer only ever made sense for popular stuff that people won't pay for.
By definition there is little business opportunity in markets where people
don't want to pay.

~~~
zigzigzag
Yeah. The article is like "everyone at BitTorrent Inc said Cohen is brilliant,
so he's brilliant". BitTorrent is a shit way to move files that only makes
sense if your users are willing to subsidise your bandwidth for you. If you
look at how big files are moved on the net in practice it's all professional
CDNs. BitTorrent is hardly used outside piracy.

~~~
icebraining
_BitTorrent is a shit way to move files_

How so? As far as I know it's actually pretty efficient.

 _If you look at how big files are moved on the net in practice it 's all
professional CDNs. BitTorrent is hardly used outside piracy._

And when the first CDN appeared, they were also hardly used. That approach
would disqualify any business except copycats.

~~~
StavrosK
Not only efficient, but also supports file integrity, resuming,
parallelization, etc. It's a fantastic protocol.

~~~
abricot
Exactly - I live in an area where lots of people have 50+ Mb symmetric
connections, and BitTorrent gave us all a dream that we could all use those
connections without everything having to be transferred over the backbone.

------
swang
so let me get this straight:

receive controlling interest of a company with $33million in cash reserves by
using a $10million promisory note to gain shares.

proceed to spend $18million in cash, some of which is spent to pay your
buddies.

when time comes to pay $10million promisory note, shrug your shoulders, and no
actual penalties are involved for not paying up.

am i missing something? sounds like a great scam.

~~~
rasz_pl
how does buying 500Mil chain of stores with its own cash reserves sound to you
then?

[https://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/dick-smith-is-the-
grea...](https://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/dick-smith-is-the-greatest-
private-equity-heist-of-all-time/)

~~~
will_hughes
For those not aware of the current situation: Dick Smith Electronics went
bankrupt about 12 months after this article.

They were like the Tandy or Radioshack of Australia at first, and followed a
similar path - killing off their electronics hobbyist roots, and became pretty
much a generic consumer electronics store.

------
a_brawling_boo
One good thing that came out of the disappointment of bittorrent inc is the
open source syncthing which I believe was inspired by bittorrent sync's
failings.

~~~
m-p-3
I'm glad it exists, but it's definitely not as intuitive to set up.

~~~
btgeekboy
I wish they would improve the story around the official distributions.

I'm attempting to migrate away from an aging, single user, files-only OwnCloud
instance to Syncthing, and the end user client is not nearly as painless.
Syncthing distributes CLI binaries for a bunch of platforms, which is great.
But there's no unified GUI for end users that's officially sanctioned.
Instead, there's a bunch of 3rd party repos that one hopes they can trust.
And, glaringly, zero iOS clients. (I'm working around this by adding a WebDAV
server to my always-on system, but it's a workaround for sure.)

------
NelsonMinar
What a crazy twist for a startup that was doomed from the start. But the
article doesn't really do a good job explaining how Johnson and Delamar were
given control of the company. I get that Accel wanted out, but why just hand
it over to a couple of bros with a plausible plan? I feel like there had to be
deeper relationships involved, or else one hell of a pitch deck.

~~~
loader
Whenever I read stories that involve guys like these that come in swinging and
think they can change things and end up just spending everyone's money, I've
always wanted to label this behavior and you got me thinking ...
"Broxecutives".

~~~
jungletek
CE-BROS?

------
WorldMaker
I had been wondering a bit about the reason for the BitTorrent / Resilio split
and this article did a decent job painting some of the picture.

------
discardorama
For some reason, this reminded me of "Pied Piper" of "Silicon Valley" fame.

~~~
touristtam
Pretty much. Let's hope the next season doesn't develop in such a dreaful way.

------
Scaevolus
I wonder what's happening with Bittorrent Live. Maybe the economies of scale
of the large companies have made P2P streaming a hard sell?

Why install a weird temperamental app when you can just stream video from
Twitch (Amazon) or YouTube or Facebook? They've all invested tens of billions
in networking infrastructure and have the necessary advertising structures to
recoup the costs.

~~~
wmf
The economics have definitely changed. CDNs are dirt cheap and are technically
simpler and more reliable than P2P. And for live video you probably want
transcoding which is also easier to do in the cloud.

~~~
lucasgonze
As former eng lead at a live streaming company, I second the idea that
transcoding is a big deal.

Streaming bandwidth _is_ super pricey, and the money is enough to really
matter. Even a startup can easily get to five or six figure expenses.
Bittorrent Live gets that right.

However transcoding is critical, given that every OS and browser has its own
format quirks. BT Live can't remotely do this.

Check out Zencoder for the real competition.

Maybe BT Live will find a niche with use cases that just produce no money at
all, or where servers get shut down for political reasons. Marches, samizdat,
and, uh, questionable copyright.

~~~
wmf
Twitter is trying to claim the political niche but maybe BT Live can become
the home of "too hot for Twitter" streaming.

On a personal note, it's great to see the old decentralization crew on this
thread.

~~~
evgen
Lucas and Wes talking p2p and Bram, I think I woke up this morning in '99...

------
riter
I used to know and work with Delamar at a startup but for the music industry
and ringtones... also, with similar concluding results. SMH.

------
newscracker
BitTorrent was, and is still, remarkable technology. Not focusing on the
ethics and costs of piracy (that affects one part of what BitTorrent is used
for), it has helped all kinds of content (entertainment and otherwise) have a
massive reach globally (and across country borders) like nothing else has. I
only feel sad for Bram Cohen in this whole series of events, and more so
considering his condition (Asperger's syndrome) and how much he would've just
put up with (in silent frustration) while others ran the show. In this
article, I was surprised to see no mention of uTorrent, the BitTorrent client,
and how it changed from the time it was bought by BitTorrent, Inc.

P.S.: Off topic, but I dislike these Medium hosted sites with large blurry
images on page load that come into focus later.

------
wnevets
Weren't they the ones to buy the beloved uTorrent client and ruined it with
adware?

------
vcool07
I think it would've worked if they had started off in a SAAS model, like, pay
$1 for exchanging 1GB of data, $10 for 10GB of data and so on. At the time it
launched there was still requirement for moving data across sites , but no
reliable way. For ex: most software/trailware/shareware came in CD ROMS
bundled in magazines !

------
shmerl
Kind of a similar story happened to Diaspora Inc. It didn't manage to become a
product or a company. But technology was good and open and it lives on today.

------
mr_spothawk
bt television is sorta sweet.

~~~
mr_spothawk
what the hell is "one America news"?

------
LeoPanthera
Very clickbaity title. This refers to BitTorrent Inc, the company, not the
file sharing protocol.

~~~
draw_down
Well, that's probably why it says "BitTorrent Inc" in the title?

~~~
kbrackbill
The original title was "Unbelievable story of how BitTorrent failed"

------
fieryskiff
Meta, but did backchannel change the title, or did the submitter? It seems
like a weird editorilization, from the current "The Inside Story of
BitTorrent’s Bizarre Collapse".

"Unbelievable story of..." feels very click-bait to me.

~~~
grzm
Backchannel could have changed the title, wouldn't be the first time a title's
been changed somwhere. The URI includes "the-inside-story-of-bittorrents-
bizarre-collapse" which makes me believe otherwise however, unless they've
been flip-flopping the title, or A/B testing.

------
orasis
BitTorrent Inc was ethically shady from day one. Call me old-fashioned, but
the investors got what they deserved by trying to profit off of piracy while
pretending to be legitimate.

