BitTorrent announced that it was acquiring µTorrent on December 7, 2006. The company said it valued µTorrent’s codebase and user community and planned to pair them with BitTorrent’s protocol expertise. The contemporaneous report did not disclose the purchase price.
When did BitTorrent acquire µTorrent?
BitTorrent announced the acquisition on December 7, 2006. TechCrunch’s report said the price was not disclosed.
This was BitTorrent acquiring µTorrent—not TRON acquiring BitTorrent. The latter was a separate transaction that BitTorrent said had officially closed on July 24, 2018, in its announcement.
Why did BitTorrent buy µTorrent?
BitTorrent presented the deal as a way to bring together µTorrent’s implementation and community with its own knowledge of the BitTorrent networking protocol. In the acquisition report, BitTorrent cofounder and CEO Bram Cohen said: “BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent’s exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community.” That is the company’s stated rationale, not an independent evaluation of the software or evidence of the deal’s commercial results.
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The announcement said µTorrent would continue to be developed. It also described possible reuse of the codebase in other applications, including lightweight software for embedded platforms such as televisions and cell phones. Those were plans stated at the time; the announcement does not establish that such deployments later occurred.
What happened to µTorrent after the acquisition?
The stated plan was to continue developing µTorrent, and BitTorrent’s present-day company page still lists µTorrent and BitTorrent as product brands offering torrent clients for Windows, Mac, and Android. That current product information does not show which products or platforms were available in 2006, nor does it by itself document the acquisition’s subsequent effects.
For current product and safety details, BitTorrent’s pages describe its offerings and note that official clients are proprietary software. The company also cautions that the software can be used to share pirated material and does not prevent malicious files from being downloaded. A client or protocol does not make every shared file legal or safe.
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