AT&T is about to crackdown on repeat pirates and the result will leave some scrambling for a new provider. According to insiders that have spoken up, the company plans to soon cut off the service of customers who have repeatedly downloaded copyrighted content despite at least nine past warnings to stop. More than a dozen customers will reportedly be notified of the service banhammer in coming days.
The blockchain, Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency universes move really, really quickly. The technology there moves faster than the price of Bitcoin, for goodness sake. As such, the time has come for multiple services - almost simultaneously - to enact the ability to trade USD (United States Dollars) for Bitcoin. Bittrex is the service we're talking about today, as they're just about to start accepting USD deposits.
Just over a month ago The Pirate Bay's website was found to be using visitors' CPU cycles to mine cryptocurrency while they browsed the site. At the time, the practice was said to be a limited test in order to see if digital currency mining could be a new source of revenue to replace traditional advertising. However, without notice Pirate Bay has returned to mining and offers no opt-out option to visitors.
Torrent and piracy websites are in a difficult situation when it comes to raising money. The more they grow in popularity, the bigger the costs of operation get, but they can't exactly depend on advertising revenue to survive. While donations via Bitcoin have been the preferred option for some time now, it appears The Pirate Bay may be moving to a more direct method for generating funds: using visitor's CPU cycles to mine digital currency.
While most indie game developers would prefer that players didn't pirate their titles, the three-person team calling itself Acid Wizard Studio have done things a bit differently. They've taken their recently released horror game Darkwood and put it up for free on the popular torrent site Pirate Bay, all without any DRM. The reason? They simply want everyone who's interested to play their game, even if they can't afford it.
Back in April, BitTorrent announced that Jeremy Johnson and Robert Delamar were its new co-CEOs. The company has been making a big and deliberate push into the media industry since, launching BitTorrent Now and its own news station, among other things. That all may have just come to a huge halt, at least if new sources are to be believed. According to those sources, both co-CEOs have been fired and booted from the company’s board of directors, a bunch of employees have been laid off, and BitTorrent Now has been shutdown.
BitTorrent Now, the company's streaming service unveiled in recent months, is now available across all of Apple's devices. In a statement today, BitTorrent announced that BitTorrent Now can be used on both iOS devices and on the Apple TV, arguably the two most common platforms that Apple users will watch it through. The service allows users to stream content, including video and music, from independent artists.
Only a few weeks have passed since news about BitTorrent’s planned live news channel, BitTorrent News, first surfaced. The company recently announced the appointment of its news director, and now it has officially announced a launch date: July 18, the same day as the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. BTN will have a team composed of half a dozen individuals live on the ground.
BitTorrent news, previously revealed in the form of a job posting, is official and it has brought in Harrison Bohrman as its first News Director. Bohrman has a solid background in the industry, having formerly served as Vice’s Viceland Senior Producer of Creative Development and, before that, having spent half a decade working at CNN.
Following the announcement of BitTorrent Now, a new ad-supported streaming music and video service, an accompanying mobile app has been released, giving users access to content while on the go. BitTorrent Now isn't aiming to compete with the likes of Spotify or Apple Music, but instead will distribute content from independent artists and filmmakers who sign up for the platform. The Android app is available now on Google Play, while iOS and Apple TV versions are "coming soon."
The folks behind one of the most-used file-downloading systems in the world now has its own "direct to fan global media platform for on-demand video and music." This means that if you considered them any less-than-legitimate a business before with their Torrent-related business, they're coming up in the world. This service has content providers making video and audio available to the masses with "creators receiving 70% of all revenue." That could be a very, very big deal.
In mid-May, BitTorrent took the wraps off “BitTorrent Live,” a planned multi-channel live video streaming platform that aims to offer content spanning many categories, including “youth culture,” sports, music, tech, and news. More information on that latter category surfaced today, with a job posting revealing that BitTorrent will launch its own TV news network some time before this fall’s election. The channel will be called BitTorrent News.