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The Pirate Bay Now Let You Stream Movies and TV, Not Just Download
An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, a new simple solution for streaming torrents directly in your browser showed up on the Web. By Friday, infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay had already adopted it. The Pirate Bay now features "Stream It!" links next to all its video torrents. As a result, you can play movies, TV shows, and any other video content directly in the same window you use to browse the torrent site.
It's only a matter of time until someone builds an anonymization layer for this that sees mass adoption.
I checked out the new torrent time thing. It is definitely malware. It sets up a windows service and turns itself on. While it is running, your computer won't sleep because it sets a 30 second wake timer.
The big problem is not the pirate bay, people who copy, people who offer the copies or share them with whatever model, be it download or streaming.
The problem is that the content industry has still not gotten there is a market for that type of product they can monteize.
Does anyone remember Video Rental Shops? You had a bunch of them in town, they had basically all mainstream media, a whole lot of TV shows, a whole lot of "classic" movies, depending on the shop even some more obscure movies (no, I am not talking about pornography (which those shops also had)). You would go there, pay some money in quite reasonable regions (no matter if it was 2$ or 6$), and get the movie.
I utterly fail to understand why this very successful and simple concept has not yet been transferred to the age of the internet. Netflix, amazon instant video and all those others are just jokes compared to what even a medium sized video rental shop had to offer "back then". I do not even want a flatrate, just a massive choice of material, TV shows, and then I'll pay an appropiate price.
Also, coordinating the big studios that create content cannot be that hard, if the biggest dozen would get together we probably would have covered way more than 90% of the mainstream and probably also 90% of the classics.
They could make two-digit billions per year and get rid of the black market and "piracy" in one go. They'd, in the long run, even take over al lot of the market of the cable networks, thus cutting out the middle man entirely and get what those make instead. But nooooo... it still feels like the Napster-times...