EU invests $22 million in BitTorrent client

The team behind the social BitTorrent client Tribler is responsible for the core P2P technology for the project, dubbed P2P-Next. The project received $22 million (15 million Euro) from the European Union and another $6 million (4 million Euro) is brought in by some of the partners.

One of the biggest names taking part is the BBC, who will use the new BitTorrent client to stream TV programs. Other partners in the P2P-Next project are the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University, Markenfilm, Pioneer Digital Design Centre Limited and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The main goal is to develop an open source, BitTorrent-compatible client that supports live streaming.

Approximately 50% of the people who use BitTorrent at any given point in time download TV shows. The current project will help broadcasters to find better ways to reach this online audience, and offer high quality on-demand television.

“This cooperation with both the British and German public broadcasters indicates that P2P is here to stay. We welcome the decision of the European Union to award this proposal around P2P. This means that Europe can expand it’s roughly two year lead in this important area,” Tribler’s Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak.

“Tribler serves as a testing ground for several world-first innovations. It serves as a living lab for P2P research. Key to our endeavor is an academically pure architecture: no central servers exist in Tribler in combination with being backwards compatible with BitTorrent,” Pouwelse added.