BitTorrent Shoot Makes Big Batch Media Sharing Easier

BitTorrent’s new mobile application, BitTorrent Shoot, makes big batch photo and video sharing easy as pie – even when you want to share between Android, iOS, and Windows Phone devices. The biggest advantage of the app, beyond its cross-platform support, is that it leverages BitTorrent’s Sync Technology to move your files. That means that files are shared directly with the device you want to share it with, without making a trip to the cloud first.

The benefit to this type of file sharing is that it makes file transfers a lot faster and much more private. When using BitTorrent Sync, the files you share are only accessed by you and the person you are sharing with. The company’s servers don’t act as middlemen in the process.

The app itself is easy to use but it may be a little different from what you’re used to. On the main screen you have two options to choose between: Send or Receive depending on whether or not you’re the one sharing pictures or videos. Clicking Send opens up your gallery where you can choose multiple pictures and/or videos to send. The app will then generate a QR code that any user who clicks receive can scan to download the files you’re sending. There isn’t a size limit on the number of files that you can transfer using BitTorrent Shoot.

Shoot may be easy to use and it offers excellent privacy to boot, but the app is going to face the big challenge of achieving mainstream adoption like many other newcomers to the market. It isn’t really a chore nowadays to send big batches of media files. Although other solutions, like AirDrop for example, don’t offer the same amount of cross-platform support, privacy, or speed that Shoot does, getting people to embrace QR codes instead of what they’re used to will be an interesting process.

Shoot offers three free sends, then you have to pay $1.99 to continue using the app. When VentureBeat asked BitTorrent why it didn’t make the app free upon launching and offer in-app purchases down the road, BitTorrent’s answer focused on privacy: Like with BitTorrent Sync, we never monetize the user indirectly. On Shoot, you’ll never see an ad. Sharing is fully private, so we’re not harvesting any user data,” a spokesperson told the publication.