BitTorrent undergoes massive makeover
BitTorrent is changing. In a bid to become known outside of the hardcore-nerd and video-pirating communities, BitTorrent announced a brand-new app with "social channels" this week, which could introduce the tool to a more mainstream audience.
The secret sauce behind BitTorrent is its peer-to-peer technology, which eases the burden of sharing large files over the Internet. Typically, a download is only as fast as the upload speed where you file is, but BitTorrent changes all that. By sharing bandwidth among everyone else who's downloading (or has already downloaded) the file, the connection actually gets faster as more people download it.
That quality makes BitTorrent a natural for casual sharing of videos, and at a quality that's severely lacking in places like YouTube. The only thing the service needs to get past is the cumbersome process of finding torrents in various dark corners of the Web, then downloading them to a piece of client software that looks more at home on an IT desktop than a Facebook profile.