14 DAY TRIAL // BitTorrent, the company, is celebrating a milestone, its BitTorrent clients now have more than 150 million monthly active users. Between uTorrent and the BitTorrent Mainline client, the company boasts that it's seeing 50 percent more users than it did in December 2010, a year ago.
50 million new users in one year is no small feat, especially when considering the fact that BitTorrent is counting monthly users, the most relevant metric.
"In December 2011, the classic BitTorrent Mainline client boasted over 20 million users, while the legendary tiny-but-mighty µTorrent client grew to over 132 million users. The numbers represent an aggregate count of both software clients running on Windows, Mac, Android and Linux platforms," BitTorrent boasted.
Most of the growth can be attributed to uTorrent, which now has four times as many regular users as it did just three years ago, at the end of 2008.
BitTorrent is still king in the file-sharing world, despite growing competition from the likes of cyberlocker sites. One of the reasons for the increased competition is BitTorrent's complexity.
Despite all of the efforts by BitTorrent, especially via the uTorrent client, many people still find it difficult to discover content available via the protocol and get it to their computers.
Apart from the work done to simplify the uTorrent app as well as the distribution of legal content over BitTorrent, the company is now boasting a new "BitTorrent Certified" program for hardware makers.
Devices sporting the official badge offer full support for the protocol. These devices range from routers that are properly configured to support BitTorrent out of the box, to set-top-boxes which can download and play content without the need of a PC.
Having the ability to download BitTorrent content straight to your TV or a set-top box hooked up to your TV is a very appealing proposition, especially for movie enthusiasts.