Name Ashwin Navin | Organizations founded BitTorrent | |
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Known for Former President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent, Inc. Similar Bram Cohen, Brad Templeton, Charles Templeton | ||
Education Claremont McKenna College | ||
Tedxmedell n ashwin navin 2012 the end of home entertainment
Ashwin Navin is CEO and co-founder of Samba TV, a data and analytics service that measures television viewership using data from Internet-connected devices and set-top boxes. The company has been compared to more traditional TV measurement firms like Nielsen which rely on the people meter to gather viewership data.
Contents
- Tedxmedell n ashwin navin 2012 the end of home entertainment
- Interview with flingo co founder ashwin navin about the future of tv
- Early career
- Commercializing BitTorrent
- References
Prior to Samba TV, Navin was the president and co-founder of BitTorrent, Inc. He joined Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, in 2004 and reportedly handled business and company-related matters while Cohen focused on engineering and product development. According to a post on his blog], Navin has resigned from BitTorrent in order to focus on his new venture Samba TV, and his new venture capital fund i/o Ventures.
Navin reportedly evaluated Cohen's invention for Yahoo! in 2004. Although it was a notable development for the Internet, BitTorrent was widely considered to be the bane of the film industry, because it made the cost of transferring large files, including unlicensed film copies, negligible to the end user.
Interview with flingo co founder ashwin navin about the future of tv
Early career
Navin is a 1999 graduate of Claremont McKenna College with a dual B.A. in Government and Economics. Before BitTorrent, he was employed at Yahoo! from 2002 to 2004 in its Corporate Development group which handled corporate strategy and acquisitions. Before Yahoo!, Navin worked on Wall Street with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch both as an investment banker and research analyst.
In 2000, Navin helped start a technology-based financial services company called Epoch Partners. Epoch was essentially the investment banking arm of several online stock brokerages including Charles Schwab, Ameritrade, and TD Waterhouse. Epoch Partners was eventually acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2001.
Commercializing BitTorrent
Cohen entrusted Navin with the responsibility of crafting a business model for BitTorrent with hopes of bringing BitTorrent out of the fringes and into the mainstream. Navin has assumed the public face of the company as an evangelist for its commercial viability. In 2007, Navin launched 3 commercial products: the BitTorrent Entertainment Network in February, the BitTorrent SDK in June, and BitTorrent DNA in October. As the foundation for these products, in 2006 Navin acquired uTorrent which is the largest Torrent client in the world, outside China. To catalyze BitTorrent's commercialization, Navin began by engaging movie industry executives directly. Although predicted by many to be highly unlikely, BitTorrent has struck relationships with many major media companies including Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Lionsgate, Kadokawa Pictures, and some others.
Beyond copyright issues, BitTorrent also faced struggles with Cable companies and ISPs which were overwhelmed with high volumes of P2P traffic on their networks. In the wake of FCC hearings that pitted Comcast and BitTorrent against each other for traffic management policies that inhibited P2P file transfers, Navin was responsible for striking a deal with Comcast] that resolved the companies' differences and defused a hotly contested issue at the heart of the Network Neutrality debate.