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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.
I stole this comment
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The point is to never pay.
Pirate bay just raised the bar... I can't wait to see the media companies and governments reaction. Guess I should grab some popcorn, this is going to be entertaining... in both ways.
Now outfits like Rightscorp have a larger number of targets of people dumb enough to torrent without a proxy or VPN to sue.
It's only a matter of time until someone builds an anonymization layer for this that sees mass adoption.
None of it is worth watching. They couldn't pay me to watch 99.9999% of the crap that has been put out in the last 30+ years. I already get South Park On my TV anyways. This feature is like stealing water out of the ocean.
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.
hollywood should welcome this, because over time everyone will get lazy and not seed and just stream and the ecosystem will falter.
it is time we alter the perception of artists and creators of art and entertainment. less as celebrities and stars who needs to live a larger than life, and more as individuals who express themselves and connect with rest better than most of us.
with effective disregard of copyright laws ( in spite of moronic attempts to expand and extend them on the part of establishment), and balkanization of what were called markets or audience according to niche tastes, they will get paid less as time goes on. they will have to live like rest of us.
whatever influence and power they will have, will be a purely a function of their effectiveness in expression and connecting with others, not on their hyped success or antics.
all in all this is a good thing imo, and takes us back to pre 19th century attitudes
Timothy you illiterate whore of the new slashdot.
Pirate Bay Now Let[sic] you stream...
Go kill yourself, dude.
E
This is insane.
Linux is like 0.01%
I have tried popcorn time and I can say that you can stream only popular stuff to begin with because you need plenty of seeders for your chosen quality which is a problem, also internet connection problem in the middle of your movie/show would be catastrophic, atleast for me. So I can only recommend downloading otherwise be prepared to be frustraited.
Sorry, just jumping in here randomly as slashdot doesn't have a /meta/ channel... how can one open stories from the front page these days?
There used to be a link 'read more' or something... now.. there is nothing..
and some stories do not have text on the front page. wtf?
One of the trackers I use that is relatively small but has been offering p2p "clientless" torrent streaming via the web browser for some time. They do use a custom BHO plugin though for the client part. Never tried it tbh, but speeds here are always 10MB/s+, if enough peers are available, that is.
No one in their right mind would want to stream content they can download, and then view at their leisure. Streaming is a conspiracy of the bosses.
you are like 0.01x10^-99999999%
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...
Is this a windows-only thing?
Doesn't stream for me on Linux Mint and Firefox. A separate tab opens in the browser and that's about all I get.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
So technically it doesn't just work in the browser. It needs a plugin.
It's also not clear if I'm still uploading while using this feature.
The solution doesn't work across operating systems and devices. So please do wake me when they're released something that actually works well enough for me to use on my entertainment system/laptop/etc.
Next people are claiming that it'll enable the entertainment industry to bring lawsuits against more people. It won't as there is VPN support available with it for a price for those who wish to hide. However I'd argue it's pointless to do so. I own a company that sells privacy friendly products including a VPN router. We're the primary sponsor behind the distribution for it and everything even. However I'd not argue people should utilise it to protect themselves from copyright trolls if what they are concerned about are lawsuits. It's a wasted effort when you have a billion pirates. Your more likely to get into accident or die of a heart attack than end up losing any substantial amount of money from a lawsuit. Our company has been sued by patent trolls- there is risk here- but the reality is copyright from an end-users perspective is a non-issue. The bigger issue is paying the lawyers bills- the actual settlement costs tend to be $20-$500 at the high end. Almost laughable, but that's on the slimmest of chances (far less than 0.001%) you get sued.
There are also reports of this being malware. I'd be a little cautious of installing it. I've not had a good chance to look through the sources and see if the complete set of sources exists (ie that there are no proprietary bits and that the sources match the binary, etc), but given we have lots of malware and malicious stuff (advertisers) going on with torrent / streaming sites in general I'd be very very cautious here.
Except everyone with a phone or tablet who wants to watch something while mobile or away from their desktop.