Quick review: Vuze (Azureus)

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Yes, I realize reviewing a product about a year after its been released is kinda pointless, and the irony of having the word "quick" in my title is not lost on moi either.:)

But I ended up installing Vuze last week, wasn't really expecting much, and hence was pleasantly surprised. Vuze is the "corporate" version of the open-source p2p bittorrent client: Azuereus. It does 2 things well, and thats why I was pleasantly surprised.
  • Its adds a decent skin on top of the basic Azuereus client UI (which you can access by clicking on the 'Advanced' tag.) Sure, the normal UI looks just like iTunes, but what video download service now doesn't?:) Its probably not a big deal for most Azureus users who'll just ignore the new UI, but I've had a lot of friends say to me, "Hey, I can't figure out how to get Bittorrent to work." Well, this goes some way to solve that problem once they try it.
  • ..and the content will give them some reason to actually try it. I was surprised by the content deals Vuze seems to have in place: reasonably interesting content from BBC, Showtime (with DRM) etc. The economics behind this would be interesting to find out, though there appears to some kinks to work out: I see featured music videos uploaded by random users (e.g. Song by Nelly uploaded by user musicrocks345 :))
Given how disappointed I've been the couple of times I've tried Joost (because of the bad performance), I can't help wondering if download-based p2p solutions like this one, don't have a better shot at winning the battle of eventually playing on our TVs.

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