(legal & profitable) BitTorrent Peer to Peer Seeding
Back in 2002, I helped design a technical marketing plan around BitTorrent, at the time a small but growing P2P protocol. As far as we know, this was the first successful commercial use of the BitTorrent network.
At the time I was working with Trymedia Systems, a DRM company focusing primarily on casual games. Their ActiveMARK technology allowed publishers to distrubute full, downloadable versions of their games in a trial mode. Once the trial expires, users could then instantly purchase and unlock the full game with no additional downloads.
The unique thing about ActiveMARK was that copied games would automatically revert to trial mode, even if previously purchased. For example, I could purchase a full game, give my friend a copy, and his would revert to a trial.
Because of this, we recognized that P2P networks provided a great opportunity for our games, and in 2002 a new P2P technology was beginning to gain prominence - BitTorrent.
I was tasked with designing our P2P distribution. I developed a seeding plan, built and configured a seeding server from the ground up, installed it in our datacenter with a dedicated 50Mbps line to ensure uptime and bandwidth for our seeds, and began seeding torrents to the major P2P networks and BitTorrent trackers of the day (Kazaa / FastTrack, Limewire, eDonkey, Gnutella, Suprnova, TorrentReactor, etc).
End result - we opened a new channel that generated many thousands of dollars in sales each month, with minimal maintenance costs after the initial setup.
Send me a note if you think I might be able to help you with projects like these.
posted on 12.20.08