There seems to be a little battle brewing down in video download land. Apparently BiTorrent's creator Bram Cohen had a few strong words against the team behind Joost at the recent VON New Video Summit earlier this week. Bram said that Joost was doing things the old media way, and not being innovative enough with their channel based concept. Bram believes that channels are just one of many ways that content can be organized.

Cohen also let people know that BitTorrent has about ten times more video content than iTunes, and mentioned their upcoming play on demand P2P streaming.

Do we sense a little battle for the top player here in the online video distribution market? Has Mr. Cohen gone a little too far by dissing his competitors? Shouldn't he focus more on what his company can offer the public, rather than smash down the competition?

[via NewTeeVee]

Whoa, didn't see this coming--but in hindsight, maybe I should have. BitTorrent, the company behind the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol of the same name, has purchased uTorrent (properly µTorrent, but I'm too lazy to type the mu), one of the very best BitTorrent clients for Windows. uTorrent is known for being full-featured but having a tiny executable size and memory footprint. In their announcement BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen and uTorrent creator Ludvig Strigeus say that BitTorrent "recognized the merits of µTorrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community" and that "Bringing together µTorrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent's expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client." The announcement says that at first little will change for the uTorrent community, with the web site and forums remaining unchanged, but behind the scenes they "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."

I'm hugely loyal to uTorrent and I wish Strigeus and the community the best. I'm very interested to see new developments with Strigeus at BitTorrent. I wonder what this means for BitTorrent's existing not-very-featureful client.