Jan 31, 2017

BitChute this BitTorrent-Powered YouTube, is it really an alternative ?

YouTube attracts over a billion visitors every month, with many flocking to the platform to view original content uploaded by thousands of contributors. However, those contributors aren’t completely free to upload and make money from whatever they like.

But what if there was an alternative to YouTube, one that doesn’t impose the same kinds of restrictions on uploaders? Here come BITCHUTE.

“The idea comes from seeing the increased levels of censorship by the large social media platforms in the last couple of years. Banning, demonetization, and tweaking algorithms to send certain content into obscurity and, wanting to do something about it,” BitChute founder Ray Vahey.

Ray Vahey, BitChut Founder

“I knew building a clone wasn’t the answer, many have tried and failed. And it would inevitably grow into an organization with the same problems anyway.”

As seen in the image below, the site has a familiar layout for anyone used to YouTube-like video platforms. It has similar video controls, view counts, and the ability to vote on content. It also has a fully-functioning comment section.

Project Maelstrom browser beta

BitTorrent's audacious P2P-powered Project Maelstrom browser enters public beta

On Friday, Project Maelstrom for Windows enters public beta and is available for anyone to download from BitTorrent's site. BitTorrent says a Mac version is coming soon, but there are no immediate plans for a Linux build.

Maelstrom is a Chromium-based browser that can function as a regular browser that accesses sites over standard HTTP/HTTPS protocols. The program also contains the ability to grab websites packaged as torrents and display them.

Although it's a Chromium-based browser, BitTorrent isn't officially supporting Chrome extensions and apps from the Chrome Web Store. Nevertheless, you can still install content from the Web Store and a lot of it should work, the company says.

Why this matters: The idea behind Maelstrom is simple: if the web relied on BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing technology, accessing web content could become much faster and more reliable than it is today. While the web's server-client architecture works pretty well, sites can often slow down or become inaccessible when servers fail or are overwhelmed by too many requests at once. Theoretically, BitTorrent-packaged sites would never go down as long as you could grab the site's files from another user.

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