Canada’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has decided that incumbent Bell Canada can charge its wholesale ISP customers based on the bandwidth usage of their end users, as first reported by CBCNews.ca. This decision puts pressure on smaller ISPs that are using Bell’s network infrastructure to implement bandwidth caps similar to those the telco is imposing on its own customers, or significantly raise prices for unmetered accounts.

Bell’s new wholesale pricing structure includes bandwidth limits of as little as 2 GB per month for the lowest-priced wholesale DSL account and charges of as much as C$1.75 ($1.59) for each GB above that limit. Customers of resell ISPs will be able to subscribe to higher tiers if they’re wiling to pay more, but Bell’s highest cap stands at 60 GB per month. Good luck to all those Canadian HD video startups. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

The OS X Bittorrent client XTorrent got released as a public beta a few days ago. The new version features enhanced search functionality, giving users the ability to include torrent sites of their choice, as well as Twitter integration and performance improvements.

The improved performance should largely be due to the fact that XTorrent switched from the libtransmission library to its own implementation of Bittorrent. From the delevoper’s blog:

“Xtorrent 2 features a brand new torrent engine named Xcore. This engine has been designed exclusively for Mac OS X and written in 100% Cocoa. The result is a lightweight, powerful, and very stable download engine that supports torrent extensions such as encrypted message streams.”

I tested XTorrent over the weekend and found it to be a very clean and responsive torrent client. The design is definitely something others have looked at and learned from, and the integrated RSS feed catcher is an important bonus for users that need this feature but otherwise prefer lightweight clients like Transmission. Read more »

Online video has significantly contributed to the growth of the market for content-delivery networks, two new research reports show, but it’s unclear how much the industry as a whole will benefit from this trend going forward. The worldwide value of CDN services is estimated to reach more than $2 billion in 2011, In-Stat reported today. That’s up from $1.25 billion in 2008. In-Stat attributes this growth largely to the increasing popularity of online video.

Those numbers are echoing similar predictions from competing market research outlet AccuStream, which is predicting CDNs to bring in $1.16 billion in 2010, up from an estimated $1.37 billion this year. However, the price war for online video delivery has actually resulted in video becoming a smaller piece of the cake in terms of percentage of overall revenue. And then there’s the big unknown: How will Apple’s and Microsoft’s plans to shoulder more of their data delivery in-house affect the industry? Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

A German software developer is alleging that a company hired by rights holders to hunt down file sharers actually helped to seed the file he eventually got sued for, according to a report from heise.de.

Hannover-based software developer Daniel Finger got sued for downloading and distributing a pornographic video via Emule. However, Finger not only maintains that he got duped into downloading the movie through misleading file names, he also thinks he actually received the movie from the very people that later helped to bring charges against him – a practice that would be very close to entrapment, and in this case quite possibly illegal itself.

The crux of the case is that Finger used a modded no upload Emule client, meaning the client was only able to download dta, but not contribute anything to the network. That kind of behavior is frowned upon in P2P communities, but it’s also been regarded to be an effective shield against potential lawsuits. Don’t upload any data, and no one will know what kind of files you’re downloading. No one except the people you’re downloading from, that is.

Of course it’s debatable whether rights holders can use their own works as baits to catch file sharers. Some might call this entrapment, while others would probably argue that rights holders can distribute their works however they chose to, and still insist on the exclusive right of distribution. Read more »

TVU Networks this week introduced PVR-like functionality for its P2P TV platform, letting subscribers record 300 or so live TV channels from around the world, including Cartoon Network, BBC World News and Telemundo. Users can record shows in real time or schedule them for later. Due to the nature of the service, however, there’s no TiVo-like programming guide available; Mountain View, Calif.-based TVU essentially picks up signals from its broadcast partners and redistributes them with the help of P2P technology.

That also means users have to install the startup’s software in order to make use of the DVR functionality — or watch any of the TV channels in real time, for that matter. And finally, they have to cough up $2 per month for TVU’s DVR service. But while all these factors make the service seem unlikely to succeed, something tells me that TVU’s audience is a forgiving one. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

P2P CDN solutions for online video used to be all the rage last year. Literally dozens of start-ups were pitching their unique flavor of BitTorrent to facilitate video streams and save content and platform owners some dough.

One of those companies was Mediadefender, better known for spamming BitTorrent sites with fake files in oder to prevent file sharing of major movies and albums. Mediadefender initially tried to go into the consumer space with its own P2P-powered video hosting site Miivi.com, but that ended in a disaster because people were assuming the site was set up to catch file sharers.

The company retreated, and eventually started to pitch its own P2P CDN solution dubbed Picast. Well, to make a long story short: Picast is no more. The Picast.com website is still up, but the project itself wasn’t mentioned at all when Mediadefender announced its rebranding as Peer Media Technologies last week.

I wanted to know more, and asked whether Peer Media Technologies is still trying to get into the P2P CDN market. Here’s what a representative of Peer Media’s parent company ArtistDirect told me:

”Picast is a great technology but we have decided to focus primarily on anti-piracy services for the time being.”

I wouldn’t be too surprised if other P2P CDN start-ups closed shop in the coming months as well.

L.A.based start-up Media Hog officially launched the open beta of its S4ve.as one-click hosting service this week. S4ve.as offers unlimited file hosting (as in: files can be as small or as big as you want), and the service is currently both free and and-free, but it comes with a catch: Files can only be downloaded for 24 hours, after which they expire.

Media Hog was founded by a couple of Napster veterans. We’re talking the music service, not the file sharing platform, but that didn’t stop the start-up from trying to venture into the world of P2P. Media Hog’s original idea was to launch a file sharing platform that would feature files from users as well as sponsored content from media companies.

The founders pitched this idea to entertainment execs in L.A., but received a somewhat muted response. However, it doesn’t hurt to chit chat when you’re already in Hollywood’s offices, and the Media Hog folks kept hearing one thing over and over again: What we’d personally really like to see, folks in the business told them, would be an easier way to share files for work.

And S4ve.as aims to offer just that. Users don’t have to register, and the site automatically spits out Bit.ly links to its files, something that should make the Twitter crowd happy. There are not really any additional features at this time, but I’ve been told that Media Hog is carefully watching the behavior of its users to see what the service should offer next.

Germany’s Pirate Party continues to attract support and attention in the weeks leading up to the country’s federal election. Representatives of the party were elected to participate in two city councils in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Pirates also did reasonably well in Saxony’s state election, where 1.9 percent of the votes were cast for the party.

Roughly 2000 people voted for the Pirate Party in this Sunday’s city council election in Muenster, a town known for its large student population. That’s about 1.6 percent of the vote – enough to seat one party member in Muenster’s city council. The pirates also won 1.7 percent of the vote in Aachen, which is the home of a well-known technical university. This means there will be a Pirate Party politician in Aachen’s city council as well.

Possibly even more remarkable is the result of Saxony’s state election, where 34,620 people, or 1.9 percent of the participating electorate, voted for the Pirate Party. That’s far from the 5 percent needed to enter the state’s parliament, and unfortunately only about a third of the number of votes cast for the neo-fascist NPD party – but it’s impressive nonetheless.

Saxony’s Pirate Party did particularly well in urban areas like Dresden, where it was able to get 3.43 percent of the votes. The Pirates were apparently a little bit overwhelmed with these results themselves: The party’s web server has been returning error messages ever since word about the results got out late Sunday.

German file sharers received countless settlement notices for allegedly sharing copyrighted material in recent years, thanks to companies like Digiprotect and Logistep. However, it looks like P2P users, and others wrongfully accused of file sharing, may have a new ally: Saxony’s Consumer Advocates (Verbraucherzentrale) recently announced a new legal aid program to help recipients of settlement notices. The organization’s press release quotes spokesperson Beate Scharf:

“You should take the deadlines of these notices seriously, but never sign any settlement without prior review.”

Many recipients of these settlement letters have never even shared any files, according to the consumer advocacy group, but merely registered the Internet account used for the alleged infringement. German courts have disagreed in the past on how to handle these and similar types of liabilities, but most recipients just agree to pre-settlement offers that cost them hundreds or even thousands of dollars instead of pursuing their case in court. Read more »