14 DAY TRIAL // After Netflix’s Ted Sarandos said that where the company moved shop, BitTorrent traffic lowered, BitTorrent fights back.
First and foremost, they say, BitTorrent has been working hard to distance itself from piracy, despite the common association between the two. For this reason, it isn’t exactly fair to associate them.
They even emphasize that its protocol was designed to move data, not for piracy and that the company has never hosted, indexed or endorsed such behavior.
However, they agree with Sarandos’ perspective regarding the fact that making more good content accessible for everyone is going to curb piracy.
Secondly, they negate that Netflix makes a dent in their traffic when they move to new markets.
“In 2009, we implemented μTP, or “micro transaction protocol.” This was done, voluntarily, to help solve a major problem facing the Internet: congestion. […] μTP dials back BitTorrent traffic during peak hours in order to give priority to other applications, such as Netflix,” the company said in a blog post.
They go even further and mention that this has saved the Internet Service Providers a lot of money and public relations headaches. And while this move has helped many companies, they did it at their own cost “because it was the right thing to do for the Internet and the people who rely on it.”
The fact that Netflix is making BitTorrent look like the bad guy didn’t go so well with the company. They say that even Hollywood is realizing that they’re not the “Boogeyman,” and that they’ve started to find ways to work together.
BitTorrent further goes that it is not competing with Netflix and instead it finds ways to support similar companies that create content, studios and others directly.
The post ended in higher spirits and BitTorrent hinted that it would help Netflix solve the problem regarding videos with a 4K resolution that are hard to stream online.