In the latest effort to prove that it’s more than just the best tool for illegally downloading Chinese bootlegs of a Disney movie from a Ukrainian pirate site, the makers of BitTorrent announced Friday that the company is preparing to release a new mobile streaming application later this year, which will take advantage of its peer-to-peer streaming technology BitTorrent Live.

Released as a closed beta experiment in March 2013, the BitTorrent Live software is designed to reduce the bandwidth, cost and infrastructure for parties streaming video content by tapping into the bandwidth of everyone tuning in.

“BitTorrent Live is built for big stories,” said Matt Mason, VP of marking, BitTorrent, in a blog post. “The more people that tune in, the more resilient the stream.”

When real world testing on BitTorrent Live first began two years ago, BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen told Download.com he envisioned it being used for everything from family weddings to corporate conference calls to multi-day music festivals.

In its beta form, users must ask for an invite to post video on BitTorrent.com, but company reps have pledged that in the future, they will be able use their own trackers and websites.

Photo is a screengrab from BitTorrent Labs website

From Stream