BitTorrent Swaps CEOs, Lays Off Staff
Peer-to-Peer Startup Fires 18 Employees: Report
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 11/9/2008 3:24:00 AM
BitTorrent, the company whose file-sharing application was at the center of a controversy surrounding Comcast’s bandwidth-management policies, has reportedly laid off half its staff and announced that its CEO has resigned.
The San Francisco startup said late Friday that Eric Klinker (pictured), previously BitTorrent’s chief technology officer, would take over for departing CEO Doug Walker.
Meanwhile, BitTorrent has laid off 18 employees, about half its remaining staff, which comes on the heels of a 20% reduction in force in August, The New York Timesreported.
Comcast announced in March it would work with BitTorrent to optimize the operation of the peer-to-peer software over the cable operator’s network. That came after the largest MSO in the U.S. was attacked for specifically targeting BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications as part of efforts to curb the heaviest consumers of bandwidth on its cable network.
The Federal Communications Commission, responding to consumer complaints and activist concerns, reprimanded Comcast for its P2P-traffic throttling and ordered the MSO to cease the practice. Comcast in September detailed its plan for dealing with bandwidth hogs using a protocol-neutral technique, which doesn’t specifically target BitTorrent or other P2P apps.
In announcing Klinker’s appointment, BitTorrent highlighted his role in spearheading the collaboration with Comcast. Klinker, who joined BitTorrent in the second quarter of 2007, previously was CTO and vice president of engineering at Internap, a provider of content delivery services, and also worked for Excite@Home.
“BitTorrent has revolutionized the way publishers and users distribute and consume rich media on the Internet and has an active user community with an install base north of 170 million clients around the world,” Klinker said in a statement. “In my new role, I look forward to working with our management team to further propel BitTorrent’s technology adoption, capitalize on the company’s growth opportunities, and drive value for our robust ecosystem of partners, which includes consumers, content owners, hardware makers, software developers and network operators.”
While BitTorrent has been best known for providing an avenue for the free exchange of pirated music and video, the company has embarked on efforts to license its peer-to-peer technology to media companies as a means to distribute authorized content.
However, BitTorrent’s attempts to build an iTunes-like destination for paid media content have fallen by the wayside and the company instead will mainly looking for licensing deals, according to the New York Times report.
BitTorrent is backed by venture-capital firms Accel Partners and DCM.
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