Earlier this year I reported how the latest version of the Vuze BitTorrent client lets you drag-and-drop content from your Vuze Library (or desktop) for playback on a number of devices.

Now it’s added Tivo and PSPs to the list of options.

The way it works is that devices simply appear in the Vuze sidebar when they’re available.  All you have to do is drag-and-drop to the device of your choice, and Vuze auto-detects whether or not the video format is compatible with device you select, convert the file if necessary, and make it available for playback.

All you have to do is sit-back and play your HD content.

“Our goal is simple:  Empower you to watch your content on any screen you want,” reads a post on the Vuze blog.

Adding Tivo makes for an interesting new option and pushes Vuze even further into the living room.

The only thing still lacking on the Vuze HD Network is quality content, but unless it starts embedding ads like Hulu it won’t be able to offer copyright holders financial incentives to make offering their content worthwhile, and ads are sort anathema to everything BitTorrent stands for.

It’s a tough call.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

The crew behind the BitTorrent client Vuze read with disbelief last week that Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton said he couldn’t see “anything good having come from the Internet.”

“Period,” in fact.

Vuze says that part of the problem Lynton may have with the Internet is that although there is finally the technology to effectively deliver content online, “the industry has only begun to solve the business model side of how we productively monetize this distribution.”

It says that what Sony and other Hollywood execs need to do is adopt the “burning platform paradigm,” that is “experiment like your business is at stake.” Having already watched the music industry run itself into the ground for refusing to evolve and embrace digital content distribution, the movie industry ought to take heed and recognize that “consumers are changing.”

“Let’s change with them, and identify business models that embrace this change,” it adds.

To this end Vuze commissioned a survey that concludes that BitTorrent users, specifically Vuze, are “Hollywood’s best customers.”

According to the data, Vuze users were 34% more likely than average Internet users to have gone to the movies or rented a DVD, and 24% more likely to have purchased one.

“We’ve been making the case for years now that Vuze users are avid entertainment fans,” it observes, and it may just be right.

For TV producers the news is a bit grim, for 40% of Vuze users report watching less live TV and as a whole.

The report sampled 693 Vuze users and 606 “general” Internet users, so its conclusions are arguably a bit light.

However, the report does square nicely with other done previous that have come to the same conclusion: file-sharers consume more entertainment products.

“Consumer Culture in Times of Crisis,” conducted by the BI Norwegian School of Management, the largest business school in Norway, and the second largest in all of Europe, concluded that file-sharers actually buy 10 times as much music as they download for free.

“The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada,” a study commissioned by Industry Canada, a ministry of the Canadian federal government, found that for every album downloaded illegally legal CD purchases increased by 0.44, or by about half an album.

Admittedly both cover music and not movies, but that’s only because the issue hasn’t been as of great importance to Hollywood as it has been the music industry until recently as households acquire faster and faster Internet connection speeds.

Either way, the message to Hollywood should be the same, and that is that it needs to stay ahead of the game and listen to what consumers want. Right now it’s apparently ignoring its “best customers” at its own peril. Consumers, especially Vuze, or BitTorrent users in general for that matter, don’t mind paying for digital content so long as its fairly priced and easily accessible.

jared@zeropaid.com

Vuze, formerly Azureus, continues to try and create new ways for users of the BitTorrent client to watch HD video content on devices that they “already care about and own.”

Back in March it introduced a new Sidebar tool feature that lets you to drag-and-drop videos from your Vuze Library (or desktop) to devices such as an iPhone, PS3, or an XBox 360.

Now it’s expanding their effort to deliver HD video content wherever, whenever you want them, by introducing “Vuze to Go,” a completely portable, self-contained version of the Vuze BitTorrent client that installs and runs on and from any portable disk drive.

“Vuze To Go” installs on any portable disk drive, like a USB hard drive or a flash thumb drive, rather than on your computer’s hard drive, and enables access to the full functionality of Vuze – anytime and anywhere.,” reads a Vuze blog post describing the new application. “Just plug your portable drive (complete with Vuze To Go) into any PC and you’re ready to go. Vuze will run seamlessly from the portable drive, and all of your downloads can also go directly to that drive.”

“And, like Vuze on your main computer, you’ll be able to play all the content in your Vuze Library even when you’re offline,” it adds.

The only drawback is that the PC version of “Vuze to Go” costs $9.99, with a free 2-week trial for those wanting to take it for a test drive first. Some may balk at the cost, but you have to consider the price in the context of accessing Vuze’s HD video library whenever, and wherever you like.

jared@zeropaid.com

Vuze, formerly Azureus, has always distinguished itself by enabling users to install a wide variety of plugins to customize the BitTorrent client and the downloading experience. From SafePeer (highly recommended by the way) to 3D View the list of available Vuze plugins goes on and on.

Now Vuze has another plugin to join their ranks – SwarmScreen.

SwarmScreen makes it harder for others to figure out your downloading habits in BitTorrent by hiding your real BitTorrent traffic in a sea of connections to randomly selected torrents.

Why is this necessary?

Apparently researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new “guilt-by-association attack” whereby BitTorrent communities can be identified simply by monitoring the downloading behavior of one user in that community

Simply put, the exploit allows copyright holders who determine what content a single BitTorrent user is sharing to then convincingly argue that all users in the communities are doing the same without monitoring them directly.

“This was particularly surprising because BitTorrent is designed to establish connections at random, so there is no a priori reason for such strong communities to exist,” says Fabián Bustamante, one of the study’s authors.

From the SwarmScreen project page:

We show that strong communities naturally form in BitTorrent, with users inside a typical community being 5 to 25 times more likely to connect to each other than with users outside. Historically, this ability to classify users has been abused by third parties in ways that violate individual privacy. We show how these strong communities enable a guilt-by- association attack, where an entire community of users can be classified by monitoring one of its members. Our study demonstrates that, through a single observation point, an attacker trying to identify such communities can reveal 50% of the network using only knowledge about a peer’s neighbors and their neighbors (i.e., up to two hops away). Further, an attacker monitoring only 1% of the network can correctly assign users to their communities of interest more than 86% of the time. (.pdf)

Enter SwarmScreen. SwarmScreen is designed to obfuscate your downloading habits by using multiple swarms to hide your traffic.

And so that your traffic doesn’t look suspicious, SwarmScreen carefully adjusts random connections so that they appear the same as your real ones.

The downside is, as would seem obvious, that it does indeed slow your download speeds. However, it does allow users to control the level of privacy/performance tradeoff via an “intuitive tuning knob.”

“We call our tuning knob SPF (SwarmScreen Protection Factor) — analogous to sunscreen, the higher the setting, the more privacy you get,” says the plugins FAQ page. “Lower SPF values reduce privacy but give you better download performance, so you can pick the trade-off between privacy and performance.”

In short, SwarmScreen gives Vuze users another layer of downloading security in an increasingly monitored P2P world.

For gPhone users BarTor is a new Android app that lets you browse your local DVD retailer, scan the bar codes  of a desired flic,  and then remotely download onto your PC.

BarTor lets you search by title in addition to bar code and is supported by both the uTorrent and Vuze BitTorrent client WebUIs.

Other features include:

• Load By URL, Load By File
• KTorrent – PHP and HTML Interfaces
• Sort By Publish Date or By Seeds and Leechers (Default)
• Purchase opportunities upon Barcode Lookup – Long Click result to open Browser.
• Choose maximum number of Torrent Search results (25 [Default], 50, 100, 250)
• Google Base product lookup
• Ability to omit results originating from certain torrent sites.
• Multiple “Client Sites” or uTorrent WebUI configurations.
• Download history
• Search history

The program costs $2.99 and can be found in the Market under applications.

Here’s a demo video of BarTor (formerly ScanTorrent).

Vuze developers are announcing the release of a new Vuze BitTorrent client that lets you to drag-and-drop videos from your Vuze Library (or desktop) to the device of your choice.

The main focus of the Vuze HD Network has been quality HD programming, but until now it’s sort of been compartmentalized and limited to playback on a desktop or laptop PC or Mac. With the new Vuze release you can now watch content on the living room TV or the on go with your iPhone.

Select "Devices" from Sidebar...

The way the new Vuze works is that it has a new Sidebar tool called “Devices.” When you turn it on iTunes, PS3, and XBox 360 will be auto-detected. Drag-and-drop videos from your Vuze Library (or desktop) to the device of your choice.

Vuze will detect whether or not the video format will playback on the device you select, convert the file, if necessary, and make it available for playback on the device. All you have to do is sit-back and play your HD content on whatever screen you want.

Drag and drop content...

For iTunes, Vuze will push the video into your iTunes Library for transfer to your Apple devices.

For PS3 and XBox 360, simply turn on your console and click the video you want to play. Vuze will stream the videos from your PC or Mac directly to your game console.

Vuze promises even more device support in the future so stay tuned.

DOWNLOAD THE NEW VUZE

Billed as the “next evolution of quality broadband entertainment,” Azureus unveiled its new Vuze service today stocked with what it claims is the “largest library of Hi-def videos.”

Now I still don’t understand why Azureus has taken such a niche approach to content but, considering that it has to find a viable way to compete with the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, this just may be the way to go. I don’t know that Hi-def content is popular enough to make the service highly lucrative in the onset but, over the long term as the price of Hi-def equipment lowers in price, it will certainly find itself in a better position.

Formerly code-named Zudeo, the site claims to attract more than two million visitors a month. What they do when they’re there isn’t specified by the company, though I’d be willing to bet that a good number if not majority is there to simply download the BitTorrent client server rather than to purchase video content.

Vuze now offers dramatically enhanced features and premium content from around the world, including the hit BBC television series Sorted. Azureus also announced that it has entered into an agreement with Showtime Networks for distribution of its original programming, which includes shows like Weeds, Dexter and The L Word (I recommend checking out Dexter if you haven’t already).

Vuze breaks new ground by offering a powerful tool set of enhanced features and functions that enable content providers to easily publish, showcase, and distribute high resolution, long form content in High Definition or DVD quality over the Internet. The big push, in addition to the industry produced HD content, is for high quality self-published content by the community at large.

“Vuze recognizes that the next generation online video experience lies within the integration of licensed and self-published content showcased in a theater-like viewing environment,” said Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Azureus. “The millions who make up the Vuze community–publishers, editors and viewers–can share long-form video and download licensed content, and experience it in High Definition on their own computer or plasma screen.”

Additional enhancements to the Vuze open entertainment platform include a completely revamped navigation system and search engine, designed to accommodate the massive influx of content from publishers, large and small, and help viewers quickly find what they want.

It also provides more options for publishers to syndicate and monetize their content through rental and purchase models. The entire experience, from search and discovery to payment, download and play, has been tightly integrated into the application. Publishers can also distribute their work directly from the application. Vuze also serves as an alternative, low-cost distribution and marketing platform for content providers to distribute content to a global audience.

Azureus also notes that Vuze will make premium content “…available at a very low cost, and offer several popular TV show episodes for free.” The details of which are unstated.

Its current content partners include BBC Worldwide, Showtime Networks, A&E Networks (including A&E, History Channel, and Biography), Bennett Media Worldwide, G4 TV, National Geographic, and Starz Media so they do have some decent content to work with.

Obvious DRM and pricing concerns aside, when it comes down to it, it’s all about content, content content first and foremost. Nobody’s even going to stop and take a look if all a service has to offer is second-rate shows from second-rate channels. Vuze seems to have a decent collection of content at the moment but, whether it’s enough to lure sufficient customers is unclear. I don’t think “self-published” content will ever have the impact that they hope it will and so I think that it’s important that they focus on continuing to build a network of content providers.

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