14 DAY TRIAL // BitTorrent, the company, is continuing its quest of weaving BitTorrent, the technology, into the very fabric of the web. That is to say, to make it unnecessary to have BitTorrent client. It does this with a BitTorrent client. Which is also a browser plugin, that's the catch.
BitTorrent Torque is its name, it's Windows-only unfortunately, but essentially it adds BitTorrent client functionality to your browser. You know, like Opera has done for ages.
Websites can then take advantage of the plugin and do all sorts of stuff with BitTorrent. The latest such experiment, coming from the BitTorrent team is OneHash. OneHash is a website that can stream any music or video from a BitTorrent swarm.
"It’s very much a prototype, so there are still some kinks to be worked out as we’re still fine-tuning Torque’s streaming capabilities, and HTML5 video/audio support remains ever in flux, but its easy to see the potential here," Patrick Williams, a BitTorrent dev working on the Torque project, wrote.
"What happens when we get this stuff working as well as other streaming services? Will direct to fan experiments like Louis C.K.’s become the rule, instead of the exception? If you can stream from torrent swarms, the hosting/bandwidth costs that C.K. had to deal with will no longer exist," he wondered.
OneHash is as easy to use as it gets. All you need to do is provide it with the link to a .torrent file, a magnet link or just the hash of something shared on BitTorrent, it figures out the rest.
The the app is open source, available on GitHub, so anyone can start tinkering with it. Obviously, the big disadvantage is that it relies on the Torque plugin. Hopefully, the team will be able to come out a pure-web solution, say a client written in JavaScript.