Vuze Blog

A History of File Sharing & the Tech That Paved the Way

Since the dawning of dawn, man has shared ideas. First, ideas were shared by grunts and pointing, and then we sobered up a bit and expressed ourselves in words. Then, really bored monks in abbots, who wished they had just stayed bored when Vikings began doing Viking things to them, painstakingly wrote down words into something called the Bible by hand. Then comes the printing press, yada yada – BOOM – here’s a computer – BAM – there’s the internet. Idea sharing becomes typified as file sharing. While it has done revolutionary things for telecommunications, globalization, instantaneous sharing of ideas and history-in-the-making moments, it has also received a lot of guff for being a detractor of capitalism. Let’s take a brief look at the history of things that led to file sharing.

Scroll over the sides of the timeline to go to the next event.

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Independent Artists on the Way

Here at Vuze we love experiencing and discovering new and longtime independent artists of all types, without infringing upon their copyrights, and we hope you do too! Soon we will be exposing some fantastic independent artists to you. Please keep an eye out for upcoming promotions. We hope you will enjoy their work!

Also, we’re happy to help independent artists gain, retain, or rebuild traction and exposure, so if you’d like to explore our working together to have us help promote you and your work, please feel free to reach out to us here; and we will get back to you soon thereafter. Please do not include any samples of your work just yet, or any attachments. Just tell us about your work, and how we may best contact you. You can be a songwriter, a musician, a film-maker, a documentarian, a photographer or other visual artist, an extreme sports athlete, an author of any type, and more.

The Vuze Team

Now playing on thousands of devices…

That’s right…  Device Playback is now being turned on for thousands of your favorite devices.  To date, we’ve focused on adding devices that you’re using in the real world to watch content on your TV and mobile screens.  As a result, we started with iOS, Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PSP, and then moved on to Android, Blackberry, and Apple TV (yes, we launched these features years ago, unlike some other very tiny clients that are just getting around to it now ).  Today, we’re continuing this crusade to unleash your content on your mobile and TV screens by adding all DLNA-supported devices (including many of your favorite Connected TVs), a few additional Android devices, and more.

New Devices:  Connected TVs, Android, and More

What’s DLNA, you ask?  Many of the TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles, and other devices you’ve bought in the past few years likely included the above logo on the device or box.

Thousands upon thousands of devices from 245 of the top global electronics brands you know and love now include support for DLNA, including Connected TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, Sharp, Panasonic, and Philips.   In addition, set-top boxes, PCs, and game consoles often include support for DLNA.  With this release, most DLNA-supported devices should now show up in your Vuze Sidebar (assuming they’re connected to the same home network as Vuze) making it possible to stream directly from Vuze to the DLNA device of your choice.  Once you spot your device name under Device Playback in the Sidebar, simply drag-and-drop.

We’ve also added support for Samsung Galaxy S II, Sony Ericsson Xperia, Netgear NeoTV, and Iomega ScreenPlay.

Faster, More Stable

And finally, a Vuze release wouldn’t be complete without updating the underlying code to make Vuze faster, more responsive, and more stable (with the benefits coming primarily from an SWT update in this release, for the geeks among us who care what’s under the hood).

Download Vuze 4.7 and give it a try.

As always, let us know what you think!

Vuze Team