While LimeWire is rolling out a social networking site, MiniNova, one of the internet’s most popular public BitTorrent websites, is rolling out a free server content distribution service.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
“We at Mininova are also seeding the torrents with our new servers which are also used for Mininova Content Distribution.” Erik wrote in the official MiniNova blog. As an example, they started seeding Steal This Film 2. They offered a graph and said that it “clearly shows at which point we started seeding (around 15:00) and how popular this movie is so far.”
The service comes at no charge and is intended for authorized content. “Over the past years, Mininova has grown to the number one torrent indexing website. Now we are re-defining content delivery by introducing free Content Distribution.” They explain.
A similar service was launched by the staff at eMule known as the eMule Content Database – though a key difference is that the database merely links to the content on the eDonkey2000 network, not actually hosting it.
LimeWire also launched a DRM-free music store which the content is re-distributed over the Gnutella network – thus making payment optional.
While this is, by far, not the first service offering to host legitimate content over a file-sharing network, the popularity of MiniNova coupled with the popularity of BitTorrent will no doubt help propel MiniNova’s new feature into a major contender.
The content will be hosted on MiniNova’s servers, boosting download speeds on the already efficient network.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
