Swarmcast Accelerates iTunes Downloads

Swarmcast's Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes offers to speed up music and video downloads from Apple's iTunes Store using peer-to-peer technology.

Swarmcast has unveiled its Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes, a program which purports to speed up downloads of music, video, previews, and other media from Apple’s iTunes Store. Autobahn uses what Swarmcast calls “multi-source streaming” to download data from a variety of network sources in parallel rather than relying on serial delivery from a single source.

Swarmcast claims Autobahn Accellerator for iTunes can reduce the download times for media from the iTunes Store by up to 90 percent.

Technologies similar to Swarmcast drive peer-to-peer networking technologies like BitTorrent, although Swarmcast operates it own set of SwarmMirrors and can tie into third-party distribution networks, The company says the technology does not rely on peer-to-peer techniques which leverage the bandwidth and storage of individual end users running the application.

“With more feature-length movies, TV shows and an ever-increasing number of songs available via iTunes alone, internet music and video are becoming a daily part of our lives. Unfortunately, waiting for content to download is also becoming a fact of life,” said Justin Chapweske, founder and CEO of Swarmcast, in a release. “We’re cutting down the waiting times so people can enjoy their content when they want and where they want.”

Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes is free, and currently available for Windows 2000/XP and 32-bit versions of Windows Vista. The company says a version for Mac OS X will be available soon.

Swarmcast is a privately-held company based in Minneapolis; the company recently added former Best Buy executive Kelly Egan as its vice president of business development. Late last year, the company raised $5 million in venture capital from Nippon Venture Capital.