An Israeli business website reports Microsoft has acquired unpopular torrent app Pando in a deal worth $11 million, and that it may be related to the next-gen Xbox console.

If you haven’t heard of it (and it wouldn’t be surprising) Pando is best known for creating the Pando Media Booster, an app used by game publishers to allow speedy downloads of large files.

Other than that, Pando is essentially a torrent client like any other torrent client.

Among gamers Pando has proved unpopular, most famously as the client of choice for League of Legends and other PC games, because unlike other torrent services Pando uploads a copy of the downloaded file to its own servers, thus seeding the file for you irrespective of if you want to seed or not.

What does that mean? Bye bye bandwidth, potentially. Dedicated internet trawlers (AKA nerds) have dedicatedly trawled the internet and uncovered a report from Israeli site Calcalist, and whacked it through good translate to produce this:

“Fendo developed a file transfer service between P2P users, and made it the means of distribution based cloud service for games, video and software content giants, while active large file transfer service for consumers and businesses.

"The purchase was made in part to give Microsoft an advantage in sharing media files for the launch of the new Xbox gaming console is expected in June, and to compete with Sony who revealed last month its future media console Playstation 4.”

So, if you’re willing to give this report credence, the Xbox will have a surprise launch in three months time.

Doesn’t seem the likeliest of outcomes, but in saying that, stranger things have happened – what do you guys think?

Have the heralds of the internet brought us yet another dud, or is there truth to be discovered in this vague, poorly translated report from Israel? Let us know in the comments.