BitTorrent Shoot offers free cloud sharing of photos between iOS, Android and Windows Phone
BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing service has launched a new photo and video sharing app today called BitTorrent Shoot. It lets you share content between iOS, Android, and Windows Phone platform. You can also download the new paid app directly from Apple’s App Store, Google Play and the Windows Phone Store.
The mobile app is designed to make it easy for users to send photos and documents across different phone platforms rapidly and just with an emphasis on spontaneity.
For trial, BitTorrent lets you make your first three sends for free and later prompts you to pay $1.99 after the transfers are complete. However, the receiver is never charged for downloading the content. In other words, the product will always be free for the recipient.
BitTorrent Shoot is a sister product to the highly successful BitTorrent Sync service that lets users to share and sync folders between devices and even across networks on opposite sides of the world. However, BitTorrent Shoot is simply for a very specific use case: sharing photos and videos between mobile devices and requires the recipient device to scan the file-sharing QR code from the sender’s device.
“If you’ve ever experienced a situation where you’re on iOS and a friend next to you has an Android phone, sending something like a big batch of photos or a long video is a challenge,” Erik Pounds, BitTorrent Sync’s VP of product management, explained. “We based the use case around spontaneity: You could be at a concert with friends, recording a video; on vacation with your family, taking tens/hundreds of pictures; maybe at a birthday dinner, capturing a group serenade.”
One of the biggest advantages of this app is its cross-platform support. The app also convinces users of privacy content as the files move directly between devices without going through the cloud, and hence, the files are secure and confidential, less hackable and has no file size limits.
There is no problem of bulk sharing or sharing of heavy files, as the sync technology is in place. Users sharing files need not limit themselves to only a set number of files or be on the same network. Users can also send files to multiple devices at the same time explains BitTorrent.
BitTorrent Shoot joins BitTorrent Sync which recently reached version 2.0 with a professional edition to add to the free version.
The company has also recently increased its peer-to-peer messaging service BitTorrent Bleep, and is testing with a peer-to-peer web browser known as Project Maelstrom.
Sharing photos or videos across platforms have become very easy these days. Thanks to free services like Facebook Messenger or probably even the old emails. In such a scenario, a paid app may not go down well with the consumers.
This is the first time that BitTorrent is launching a paid mobile app without a free tier. BitTorrent and uTorrent apps on Android have paid Pro versions, but they also have very popular free counterparts.
When questioned as to why the company is charging for the BitTorrent Shoot app right at launch, rather than offering a free version and adding new features. The company defended its move by saying that the new app will never feature ads and it will offer better privacy and data protection than counterpart apps, which in turn adds value to the app.
In short, BitTorrent is hoping that users will pay for privacy, which time and again has been proved very difficult to sell.
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