In light of Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, investors are hunting for the next cash-out. Maybe it will be BitTorrent, which announced it has snagged $20 million in venture capital. The investors include Accel Partners and Doll Capital.
BitTorrent is super-sophisticated technology platform that allows for efficient transfers of data (this is accomplished with whiz-bang peer-to-peer technology). In other words, it is a great vehicle to deliver video. It also became a great place to file-share copyrighted content.
But, over the past year, BitTorrent has been clamping-down on this. Of course, that makes the site appealing to traditional content players. In fact, this week, BitTorrent signed licensing deals with a variety of Hollywood players, such as Paramount and MTV.
I interviewed Chase Norlin, who is the CEO of Pixsy, which is a search engine for multimedia content. According to him: "Bittorrent's deals with the studios is just another example of content owners requiring multiple avenues for distribution. Bittorrent seems to have a good start in being the platform for this, but I suspect that there will be multiple distribution channels. Actually, the company in this space that I believe will be a big player in a few years is Comcast."
Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates DealProfiles.com.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-04-2006 @ 1:24AM
Gary Bourgeault (thealphamarketer.com) said...
Even though BitTorrent is making deals with the big media companies, it obviously isn't any type of differentiation for them. That's just becoming a commodity business online. Everybody's doing it.
Now the licensing of they property across the various companies on the company web sites, that could be something that could work great for them; it's what they said they're going to use the new capital for - to promote that specific strategy.