BitTorrent (company)

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol owned by BitTorrent Inc., that was invented by Bram Cohen. It is used to distribute data and other electronic files through the internet. BitTorrent is primarily used to efficiently share large files over the internet such as movies, tv shows, videos, books, and audio files.

BitTorrent allows users to share files they have on their computers by making them available as torrents. Torrent files are hosted on users computers hold the entire original file and are referred to as seeds. Seeds are then split up into a smaller files that can be shared to other users through a BitTorrent Client. A BitTorrent client requests the file seed and is sent one of the seed files at a time until all pieces of the seed are dowloaded. When a seed is being downloaded, or uploaded, the pieces of the seed are often coming from several different computers through peer-to-peer communication swarms.