Social Machinery

During 2009, traditional media industry has been battling hard against P2P services. Legal woes against P2P services like Pirate Bay, Mininova and isohunt gave the impression to some analysts that P2P was more or less over. Besides, a massive communicational campaign to “educate” users about downloading legal content, the rise of streaming content as the main internet source of traffic and legal actions against individuals put a question mark about the sustainability of this technology in the future.

Nevertheless, if we analyze user data the trend seems to be the opposite. It seems that BiTorrent and P2P is alive and kicking. As a good example, folks from Utorrent just announced that their service is the most used P2P around the globe and is growing exponentially. Last year , UTorrent closed with more than 28 Million unique users per month. This year they have reached an astonishing 52 million unique users per month, almost 100% growth.

 So, it looks like for 2010 the war is still on. Probably traditional media will continue their legal actions against users and service providers like Utorrent. In the other hand, P2P providers will try to find new business models and continue innovate their technology. For instance UTorrent new client supports streaming and additional security functionalities, opening a new avenue for their business.