BitTorrent hires former Vice and CNN producer to launch live TV news network

BitTorrent has confirmed long-standing rumors that it’s to launch its own live-streaming TV news network with the hire of former Vice and CNN producer Harrison Bohrman.

Bohrman, who covered breaking news and presidential elections as writer and producer at CNN for five years before joining Vice as senior development producer, will set about building a news team from scratch for a new division called BitTorrent News.

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BitTorrent (full name “BitTorrent Inc”) is best known as the company that develops the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol, as well as the uTorrent app that’s built on the protocol.

The company has entered a transformation phase of late as it looks to move away from associations with illegal file-sharing and piracy, instead pushing itself as a media distribution company, with multichannel video streaming apps and original TV shows emerging from its vaults.

More recently, BitTorrent announced that it was spinning out its Sync business into a standalone company called Resilio, and a couple of weeks back it announced an overhaul of its Bundle platform, with a new name, mobile-focused apps, and ad-supported streaming monetization for producers.

Now, with BitTorrent News in the works, the P2P file-sharing company’s transformation is entering a crucial phase. The company hasn’t confirmed a timescale for the launch of the new network, though did say tell VentureBeat it would be “very soon.”