It looks as though BitTorrent is looking to further spread its wings now that it has received an infusion of cash from investors. In May of this year, BitTorrent first went legitimate by scoring a movie distribution deal with Warner Brothers. Later in July, the company landed another distribution deal with independent movie distributor Image Entertainment.
BitTorrent is now using part of its $20 million USD in financing to purchase the popular uTorrent BitTorrent application. uTorrent has been praised for its lightweight profile (170 kB application) and memory footprint (around 4 MB during typical usage). Bram Cohen and Ludvig Strigeus, the writers of the uTorrent application, had this to say about the acquisition:
What does this mean for the µTorrent community? Not much, at least not at first. The intention is to maintain the website as it is, and keep the forums and community active. Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.
There was mixed reaction on the uTorrent forums with regards to the uTorrent-BitTorrent deal. "Absolute disgrace...Bit Torrent are now affiliated with the big players Warner Brothers for example, and they have signed an agreement to distribute digital content through the Bit Torrent client, what does this mean? basically that uTorrent will be that distribution client at some point in the future, and how long before we see adverts for movies within uTorrent," said antk1 on the uTorrent forums. Another user, doink-chan, was more gracious with regards to the announcement "As long as µTorrent keeps being a good program and doesn't become doinky, I have no problem with it."
For those that of you that are uTorrent fans, you might want to go ahead and grab the latest stable copy of the application before it is rolled up into BitTorrent's official client. You can also catch the FAQ regarding the acquisition here.
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