Xunlei

Xunlei

File:Xunlei.png Xunlei 5.9.12.1196 running under Windows 7
Developer(s)	Thunder Networking Technologies (a.k.a. Xunlei Networking Technologies)
Operating system	Microsoft Windows
Available in	Simplified Chinese , Traditional Chinese , English with Language Pack
Type	Peer-to-peer file sharing
License	Closed source Adware
Website	www.xunlei.com

Xunlei (Chinese: 迅雷; pinyin: Xùnléi; which means "swift thunder"), is a download manager and bittorrent client developed by Xunlei corporation. Xunlei is the most commonly used BitTorrent client, due to its popularity in China.

Corporation

Xunlei is developed by a company called 「深圳市迅雷網絡技術有限公司」 (Shenzhen Thunder Networking Technologies, Ltd).

History

• January 2002, Shenglong Zou returned to China from Silicon Valley and founded Sandai with his Duke schoolmate Hao Cheng.
• 2004, IDG invested in Sandai.
• May 2005, Sandai changed its name to Xunlei.
• 2006, Morningside Ventures invested in Xunlei.
• January 2007, Xunlei received third round funding led by Ceyuan Ventures with participation from Morningside, IDG, Fidelity Asia. Google was a strategic investor.
• August 2009 , Snk Media Asia invests funds to Xunlei. Xunlei music influence expands greatly.

Products

The Xunlei download manager, generally called Xunlei, is the flagship product of Xunlei Corporation (Sandai Technologies). With its core technology of P2SP data transfer engine, Xunlei expands its advantage from downloading to multiple fields. Now, Xunlei Kankan, an independent video-on-demand product providing DVD quality videos is very popular. Gougou search engine which provides multimedia search is the fourth biggest search engine in China. Other supplementary products range from local Media Player to Software Assistant. In Baidu's Top List of Software Search, Xunlei and Xunlei Kankan generally hold 2 of the top 3 most popular software.

Xunlei

Since 2006 Xunlei is one of the most popular software chosen by end-users in China

Xunlei also consists a product family with its members including the most popular Xunlei 5 and Xunlei Mini, Web Xunlei. As adware, Xunlei has advertisements in its products generally in the form of Web banner. Recently, it has started to offer VIP programs, providing value-adding services such as offline downloading.

P2P Client

Xunlei (Thunder) is classified as a download manager rather than a bittorent client because of the special hyper threading network access technology which allows the program to speed up the download process significantly. Xunlei can not be simply seen as a P2P client (It's actually a P2SP client) because, unlike typical file sharing software,it makes sharing compulsory. Xunlei users are used as peers to speed up each other's downloading, without being listed. No search, downloading, or publishing of private files is supported, as all these features are supported by another Xunlei product, Gougou. There is an embbed toolbar of GouGou in Xunlei. In summary, Xunlei is a tool and can be used only to download public files from web sites, if users wish to search for copyrighted or adult materials for downloading, they will have to utilise the embedded toolbar or the GouGou service directly .

Xunlei Kankan

Xunlei Kankan is generally called Kankan. Kankan provides video-on-demand service with a web interface. The differences between Kankan and other VOD products such as video sharing like Youtube are as follows: First, Kankan makes use of its so-called P2SP technology and provides high definition DVD-quality videos. This naturally requires client installation. Second, Kankan claims to have copyrights and cooperates with many content providers and service providers in China. With Kankan's increasing popularity and increasing fame, Kankan grew so rapid that if often surpasses Xunlei in Baidu search traffic. However, there are reports that Kankan's streaming is not working very well in some cities of China.

Gougou

Gougou is a search engine focusing on multimedia search, but search of commercial software are also supported. As a fourth search engine in China, Gougou is No. 1 in video search and movie search market, a very large selection of movies can be found on the search engine, which includes mostly Hollywood movies. Gougou provides direct searching of files, which causes accusations of copyright violation. This website often has pop-ups of its advertisers, which frequently infect one's computer with computer viruses and Trojans. Gougou makes efforts to screen certain keywords; yet, it's still far from being able to find a final solution to the aforementioned issues.

P2SP

P2SP stands for "Peer-to-Server-and-to-Peer". It is a Content Delivery Network for Xunlei. It works in a similar way to a Magnet URI. It combines sources from a variety of P2P protocols along with HTTP and FTP sources. These URI's are searchable via the Xunlei application.

Challenges

Computer Viruses

Gougou Search Engine often directs users toward harmful websites or simply bring up pop-ups from its advertisers that are harmful, infecting their computers with computer viruses and Trojans. This caused Gougou to provide no 3rd party pages in a time which aroused protests from site owners. Download sites are often small and liable to attacks. It is technical challenging to be an effective search engine while still guaranteeing safety of users.

Copyright

Content holders often find users downloading their wares through Xunlei. They accuse Xunlei of helping, actively or passively, others to violate their copyrights. Xunlei however declares itself as only a tool and has no right to control how users use it.

As copyrights protection became stricter, Xunlei tried to find ways around this. In 2007, Xunlei announced a new service called "Claim Copyrights" which enables copyright owners to protect their contents on Xunlei's platform. Later, Kankan claims to host only authorized content. Whilst these actions made progress, it's still far from a final solution.

Competition

Xunlei's popularity arouses much competition. The biggest competitors are Tencent whose flagship product QQ is used by nearly every Chinese user, and FlashGet whose product was the previous No 1 in China. As more and more tools are developing their own P2SP, Xunlei's technical advantage is facing greater challenges.

Debates and Discussions

File Sharing

Xunlei is not a P2P tool in its essence as it does not support active file sharing. While copyright advocates view Xunlei as a P2P tool and a facilitation to violate copyrights, P2P advocates criticizes Xunlei is a P2P vampire with much greater downloading than uploading. Many pure P2P tools blocked Xunlei. This blocking lessened after Xunlei began balancing download and upload ratios.

Direct Linking

Direct linking, generally called leeching, is a concern to many site owners. In 2006 Huajun, the leading software downloading site in China, started blocking of Xunlei, along with many other downloading sites. The key issue is whether Xunlei is leeching and hurting sites to its own benefit. As more and more downloading tools embrace P2SP and bandwidth becomes cheaper, the problem seems to fade.

Privacy

Xunlei shares files by default without additional notifications after installation. While Xunlei argues that such action is a convention for every software and users can disable it, this still worries some users as sharing policy in Xunlei is unknown. Monitoring shows Xunlei shares only the files downloaded through it. File moving or renaming can automatically disable sharing.

External links

• Xunlei portal - Official Xunlei Site in Chinese
• Baidu Software Top List - Baidu's search list of software in China
• Google to invest in Chinese video website - Times - brief report on the Google investment