BitTorrent Inc. announced that it has bought out competing BitTorrent client µTorrent. BitTorrent is a popular peer-to-peer file distribution protocol used by many applications, including µTorrent and the official BitTorrent Inc. client. It works by breaking files up into many small blocks and intelligently shuffling those blocks across a distributed swarm of clients. In practice that means download speeds increase as more people download which is directly opposite of how most internet downloads work.
In an online post about the transacation, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen made some interesting comments about where his protocol might be headed:
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.