File-Sharing Firm BitTorrent Acquires uTorrent

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on December 8, 2006 - 1:57pm.

San Francisco - A week after announcing that it has landed $20 million in new funding, BitTorrent, a provider of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology, said on Friday that it has paid an undisclosed amount to acquire uTorrent, a lightweight implementation of the BitTorrent protocol.

BitTorrent said that it plans to integrate some of its content delivery technology into the uTorrent client. The company said that the move will accelerate its plans to provide content delivery services to web sites looking to distribute large, high-quality files, as well as strengthen the adoption of its technology in embedded systems, including televisions, mobile phones and other non-PC platforms. Together, the combined install base now exceeds 135 million worldwide.

"BitTorrent recognizes uTorrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community," said Bram Cohen, the CEO of BitTorrent. "Ludvig Strigeus, the developer of uTorrent, clearly put a significant amount of time into optimizing the client, which has already been widely adopted by the BitTorrent community as a safe and efficient implementation of the BitTorrent protocol."

Related Links:
http://www.bittorrent.com/Plone/press/bittorrent-acquires-utorrent
http://www.utorrent.com