How do you improve the fastest and most popular BitTorrent client in the world? This is a question that BitTorrent, the company, has been tackling with its uTorrent client over the last couple of years. The ability to rate and comment on torrents, drag-and-drop sharing, remote management via uTorrent Remote, the App Studio, and addition of many independent and creative commons content partners have all made uTorrent an excellent and free tool that goes well beyond straight-up, pedal-to-the-metal torrenting. uTorrent now has over 100 million monthly users as a result.

Now, however, BitTorrent is taking an interesting turn: it’s going freemium. The new freemium app is called uTorrent Plus, it has all of the usual uTorrent features, but it also bakes in a slew of very desirable perks: virus protection, integrated video playback, video and audio transcoding for any connected smartphones, tablets, and consoles, and a supercharged uTorrent Remote that can access your downloaded files from anywhere in the world. The price, when it emerges from beta testing in the next few months, will be $25 per year.

For the last week, we’ve been playing with uTorrent Plus here in the ET bunker. Read on for some hands-on impressions, but bear in mind that this is a pre-alpha version where a lot of features are broken, and a lot of functionality will change.

At the end of the review, we have 500 uTorrent Plus early-access, one-year subscriptions to give away.

Virus protection

If you do most of your downloading through uTorrent, wouldn’t it make sense to build a virus scanner into the program itself, rather than running a resident-in-memory, puts-a-sizable-dent-in-your-FPS virus scanner like AVG or McAfee? BitTorrent has teamed up with BitDefender (similar names, eh?) to provide built-in Virus Guard protection. If you’ve downloaded Virus Guard from the uTorrent App Studio, it’s the same deal, only the uTorrent Plus version has a larger virus definition database and the ability to actually clean up any malware that it finds.

In practice, this works exactly as you’d expect; you’re notified when a file has a virus and given the option to clean it, and when a file is clean you get a nice, reassuring green checkmark.

Integrated audio and video playback

This one’s a no-brainer: instead of opening movies and TV shows in an external program, uTorrent Plus now includes an integrated media player. For now this seems to be hardcoded to use Windows Media Player, but we’re told that you’ll probably be able to choose your own media player in a later beta or the final build. This feature will also let you watch media as it downloads, streaming-style, as long as the torrent has a high enough availability.

In practice, this works quite well — and it’s certainly good for checking whether a media file is real or not — but you can’t escape the fact that you are stuck within uTorrent. You can still go full-screen, but if you click any other part of the uTorrent UI, the media player stops immediately. Worse, you can’t tab back to the media player: you have to navigate back to the torrent, click Play, then scan through the file. Hopefully by the time the final build rolls around the media player will work in the background.

And now for the two juiciest features: automatic transcoding and worldwide access to your files