Due to server complications, CBC decided to team up with mininova and let them seed the torrent files for “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister”. It is great to see that mainstream broadcasters use BitTorrent to share their content online, and even better, that they use mininova’s content distribution platform to do so.

Last week we reported that CBC, Canada’s public television broadcaster, was about to release CNGPM on BitTorrent. Because of server issues, CBC has now turned to mininova, who now seed the torrent files for the show.

Tessa Sproule, head of CBC’s Digital Programming told TorrentFreak: “We had aimed to include a direct link to the torrent files on cbc.ca/nextprimeminister, but ran into a conflict with the CBC server which meant we needed to point to the file elsewhere, and that’s where Mininova came in. Since then, we’ve also submitted the CNGPM BitTorrent to Miro, Vuze, and a number of other torrent sites/services.”

Mininova’s content distribution platform, which currently has over 300 premium publishers, is ideal in this case because the BitTorrent site will also take care of the seeding, making sure the torrents never die. All CBC has to so is upload the file, and the torrent will automatically created and seeded for them. Read the rest of this entry »

The popular BitTorrent site Mininova is currently Beta testing BitTorrent powered video streaming. The new streaming feature allows users to watch videos instantly, streamed from .torrent files.

The new feature will be integrated into the featured torrents section, which lists all the distributors taking part in Mininova’s content distribution platform.

The Open Source “swarmplayer” which is used for the video streaming service is developed in collaboration with the Tribler team from the Technical University Delft and Free University Amsterdam. Tribler is also working together with the BBC and several other European broadcasters, and they recently received a $22 million grant for P2P research from the European Union.

The swarmplayer has also been demonstrated for a 100+ audience of media industry insiders in Geneva at the European Broadcaster Union event on Open Internet TV this week. The streaming magic comes from replacing the tit-for-tat algorithm with Give-to-Get. Tribler project leader Johan Pouwelse stated after his keynote speech at the conference: “the attitude of several key media stakeholders in Europe are shifting and they are now exploring P2P on a serious scale.” Read the rest of this entry »

Mininova has evolved quite a bit since it has started three years ago. Within a year it was one of the most visited torrent sites on the Internet, and the ever increasing number of users resulted in the 4 billionth torrent download recently. Time to ask some questions.

The Mininova team has always been on top of the latest p2p developments. They recently launched a content distribution platform for independent publishers, a music streaming feature, and in the meanwhile they served billions of torrents. In fact, Mininova celebrated the 4 billionth .torrent download earlier this week.

Contrary to the Pirate Bay guys, however, the people behind Mininova prefer to lay low, and don’t speak out in public very often. We had the chance to do a short Q&A with Niek, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Mininova (yes, it’s a company).

TorrentFreak: Recently you have started to focus more on legal content, that is .torrent files uploaded by approved publishers. What are your plans with the Mininova publisher platform for the future, and will this affect the other .torrent files hosted on Mininova? Read the rest of this entry »

The popular BitTorrent site Mininova just released a set of new features, including music torrent streaming. The new music streaming feature uses a Java applet developed by BitLet, which is easy to use and compatible with all Java-enabled browsers.

With the new music streaming feature users can listen to individual music tracks, streamed from .torrent files. It is integrated in the featured torrents section, which lists all the distributors that take part in Mininova’s content distribution platform. An example of a streamable torrent is this track.

If you want to stream music torrents that are not listed in the featured section, you’ll need to use the Bitlet website. The service currently supports mp3 and ogg/vorbis files.

BitTorrent streaming is not restricted to music files, and indeed, Erik, one of the founders of Mininova told TorrentFreak that they are currently looking into the possibility of video streaming via BitTorrent as well. He said that Mininova will start a private BETA test of the BitTorrent video streaming integration in a few weeks. Read the rest of this entry »