Ashwin Navin, Trying to Make BitTorrent 'Good'

Kevin Maney writes: I sat down yesterday with Ashwin Navin, president of BitTorrent, to talk about his challenges running one of the most controversial companies on the Internet. We met after he was on a panel at the Digital Media Conference in Tysons Corner, Va.

BitTorrent has, at different times, been fired at from all sides. At first it was seen as enabling piracy of video and movies because its peer-to-peer network allows anyone to ship huge files around the Net. Hollywood feared it as a next-generation Napster. More recently, Comcast and other broadband providers have tried to limit or cut off BitTorrent users, supposedly because they hog so much bandwidth. One of the Internet's creators has even come out with a box that can limit BitTorrent use so networks stay uncongested for other uses, like voice calls and Internet radio.

Navin has made it his job to fight the "bad" image of BitTorrent. "I've come farther than I thought I would at this point," he says. "I think the technology has merit, and if we give people ways it can be a benefit, deals get done." The movie industry has shifted from fighting BitTorrent to embracing it as a technology that can allow it to efficiently sell downloads of movies. Warner Brothers, Paramount and others have deals with BitTorrent. More recently, BitTorrent is powering movies on News Corp.'s MySpace TV.

Navin argues that BitTorrent doesn't build an index of available files, a la Kazaa and other file-sharing services that have gotten whacked because they enable piracy. It's simply a technology that breaks up a giant file -- like a movie -- into tiny pieces and relies on users' computers to forward them around the Internet until they arrive at their destination. Navin is good at pushing the right PR buttons, noting that if his technology allows soldiers in Iraq to keep up with episodes of Lost or lets Chinese news videographers get around state controls -- that must be good, huh?

He says he's got the best collection of P2P engineers in the world -- 34 of them in San Francisco. Content owners that want to ship video around would do better to license BitTorrent than try to build it themselves. "Joost is P2P," he notes. "Most people would tell you, it doesn't work very well."

BitTorrent's client has been downloaded 180 million times, Navin says. It has about 40 million to 45 million users a month.

His next business target is the videogame industry. BitTorrent should allow consumers to download games more efficiently than they can now. he says a videogame company could see a 90% to 95% reduction in the server power it needs to distribute games online if it uses BitTorrent.

Of course, video pirates do use BitTorrent -- a lot. And BitTorrent doesn't do anything to stop it. "We don't condone it," Navin says, as thought that's enough.