Lately Mininova, one of the leading BitTorrent trackers added a new service called Content Distribution. It allow premium publishers to share their content on the site, only if the publishers own the accounts on Mininova. How different the content from this service compared with some other content you can found on other torrent sites? The publishers must own the content, in other word they they produced the content and legally want to distribute the content for free through the Mininova site.

Building the Content Distribution Service in Mininova means finding a fresh approach of running a torrent site. As more and more content available on these torrent sites are originally uploaded by producers themselves, they might change the perception of users by saying BitTorrent can also used as an acceptable means to deliver user-generated content.

A new open source challenge in this year. Open source players like BitTorrent and MySQL have decided to close their source codes. The President of BitTorent said it is due to the people who use their open source code were repackaged the product, charging for it or even worse, loading the software with spyware. Thus, unlike all other P2P softwares, BitTorrent will still be released to the public for free, but it will be a closed source product.

Meanwhile, MySQL also announced that it will no longer be distributed the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball. As a result, it will make the non-customers to accessing the code harder while MySQL promised that the code will be generated through the MySQL BitKeeper repository. One of the things that many users worry about is whether they’re getting an inferior version of MySQL by using the Community version. Urlocker says that MySQL “wants to make sure the Community version is rock solid,” but admitted that the company has introduced features into the Community edition of the software that “[weren't] as robust as we thought, and created some instabilities.” According to this article.

The largest BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay has been freed from child porn allegation, following the news from Sweden about the possibilities of the block on 7 July this month. As stated in their blog, “I want to point out that still to this day, the police has not given us one single hint on what content on the site has been containing child porn - and the things we have filtered out has been proven not to be child porn either. So wtf? What is this content their talking about?”

I believed that they want to be legitimate. The new free uncensored image hosting BayIMG they’ve built recently, they want to let the public know they are not in the business of building any kind of porn site. They stated it pretty clear in the landing page.

This is a company that I’ve been tracking for some time since I first saw it on the web. A Pittsburgh-based stealth startup, Rinera Networks has raised $9 million funding in a round A financing from existing angel investors that are New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Foundation Capital, according to this press release. The funds secured was known to be used in developing the unique technology that will help people to distribute the videos over the Internet in a less burden manner. What sets Rinera Networks apart is its company co-founders. The President Dr. Hui Zhang is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Dr. Ion Stoica assumed a position as Associate Professor at University of California at Berkeley. Both aimed to develop a technology that would help people download videos through peer-to-peer (P2P) in a legal way. Moreover, the software that they’re developing will also help in identify P2P data, let Internet service providers (ISPs) decide how much of the data they are willing to carry, at what volume and price, and then deliver it as reliably as server-based content distribution systems, with the tracking feature that capable for use in accounting purposes, as reported by this article.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this news is the sort of technology that Rinera Networks was developing at this moment. What is peer-to-peer content distribution as perceived by Rinera Networks. We can get a glimpse of it through this article found at the link of Dr. Hui Zhang’s faculty page. If you like to read technology working paper, you can click here for the paper entitled, “Efficient Content Location Using Interest-Based Locality in Peer-to-Peer Systems. (PDF)”

It’s a week after BitTorrent launched its BitTorrent Entertainment Network on 26th last month. I’ve been busy tracking and reading what people talked about the newest online services offered by BitTorrent. I believed that most people were still wondering around whether this pay-service will be succeed in the market eventually. From a simple idea originally came up by Bram Cohen, founder of BitTorrent that there should be a better way to distribute contents on the web, and now a new pay-service business model emerged, BitTorrent is on their way to prove the people that legally movie download is a viable business in the future.

BitTorrent claimed the Entertainment Network that they found is a true marketplace for one-stop distribution platform for movies, TV, music or podcasts. Now they charge $3.99 for the newly released movie while older titles are $2.99 to rent. TV shows and music videos are download-to-own at $1.99 each, according to their press release. Besides, rented content can be downloaded within 30 days from the transaction and 24 hours to watch it after the user made the payment, as listed in their terms of service. However, music and some games are offered at charge for the users.

I’ve been reading some news that people are complaining the issues of slow download, bandwidth hurdle, compatibility issues as well as the some other peer-to-peer (P2P) services are on par with BitTorrent, if not better, and etc. It seems that people are not adapt to this pay-service business model, and to some people, P2P mean free at a certain point. When an user decides to buy a service, his/her expectation becomes higher, and higher everyday. There is always an obstacle for companies when they start to monetize their web distributed movies, TV episodes, and etc. and assume, not able to send huge those digital files as mentioned just now in a steady stream to their users.

On the business side, I see BitTorrent as a company that engineers rule and now turn into the marketers rule. Despite the foresee potential of this emerged business model, there is still a shortcoming: I wonder the large percentage of BitTorrent’s current users would buy this idea and willingly to pay for the service render, from the download rates that I observed on their pages. It could be the biggest task for BitTorrent to open a new market for them right now. How they going to persuade their current user base to pay for the movie download is still a big question for months to come. It might leave a big room for new players to establish themselves in the market as a branded distribution medium for the existing BitTorrent’s users. Additionally, many people in the past have attributed the success of BitTorrent is due to the right timing, however, it became apparent that when a P2P become legal, it would definitely under pressure to perform.