The MIME type applications/x-bittorrent is used to denote the presence of Bittorrent seed files. This MIME type is classified as "application".

Bittorrent seed files carry the extension TORRENT. Bittorrent is an extremely popular file distribution protocol. It is essentially a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that is centrally managed by a server called the tracker. The seed file does not contain any part of the actual file being shared. It instead has the file location, size, tracker location and authentication information regarding the file being shared. The protocol has been designed to take advantage of even low bandwidth peers by allowing the entire swarm (collection of peers) to share the total available upstream and downstream bandwidth.

This was designed to take the massive load of multiple downloads off the web hosts" server/s and utilize whatever little bandwidth each peer can offer. The original file is not shared as one whole chunk of data but is shared as several hundreds of small blocks of data. Once one peer receives a data block he can in turn upload it to other peers. This way, the initial peer is relieved off sharing the entire file multiple times.

Theoretically, the initial peer can leave after sharing each block only once. The swarm will then continue swapping these blocks till everyone has a full copy.