The beginning of the new TV-season is generally speaking the busiest time for EZTV, as over a million people flock to the site every day to catch up with their favorite shows. So when they found that their preferred TV-torrent index wasn’t loading, some people started to worry.

Luckily for them, there is not much to be concerned about.

EZTV’s NovaKing informed TorrentFreak that the downtime is due to hardware issues. They are currently working on replacing old servers with new ones, and when this is done the site will come back. This could take a few more hours up to a few days, depending on how much time the volunteers can free up.

“We recently got new servers to help with the increase in visitors we are getting to the site. With the new setup EZTV and sister sites like ezRSS will be more stable,” NovaKing said.

In recent months EZTV has seen quite an increase in usage, and since the old servers couldn’t keep up this often resulted in downtime. And aside from better up-time, there’s more for EZTV’s users to look forward to.

“The new version of the site is almost complete as well which we hope most people will like and find more useful,” NovaKing told us.

One of the new features currently in development is the integration of ezRSS (which is also down) with EZTV’s “my shows” feature. This means that users can setup an RSS feed for their favorite shows on the EZTV website, and use this feed to automatically download new shows.

The upcoming iteration of the site will also have a revamped forum, improved usability, more detailed show information and an updated TV news system. When these new features will be rolled out is unknown at this point.

Unlike other torrent sites, EZTV is completely advertising free and run entirely by volunteers. All the people working on the site also have real jobs to attend so site maintenance and upgrades sometimes take longer than with other sites. Still, that doesn’t mean that EZTV isn’t publishing content elsewhere.

Update October 5, 2011

EZTV has not made the switch yet and is still facing issues every now and then. The site is down at the moment but the techies are working on bringing it back.

Source: EZTV Goes Down In Preparation For Big Return

About a year ago TorrentFreak caught up with RSS inventor Dave Winer, who noticed that the RSS feeds on most torrent sites were a ‘mess’. Nearly every site uses a different format, and this is problematic for application developers who want to create tools for BitTorrent users.

“It’s pretty much a mess,” Dave Winer told TorrentFreak while outlining some suggestions for a BitTorrent RSS namespace in a blog post. “Let’s clean it up,” Winer said, encouraging torrent site admins to join the discussion.

This call for action was soon picked up by various torrent site admins, and yesterday the EZTV team launched a BitTorrent RSS standard on their sister site ezRSS.

“The current RSS spec was rather limited when it came to torrent information and some of the methods other RSS feeds were doing in regards to torrents was just messy, by creating a bit torrent RSS namespace, we can now give more specific data to applications and users in a structured format,” EZTV’s Novaking told TorrentFreak.

“Dave Winer gave some good advice, and we have taken a lot of it on board. We still plan to expand on the spec, so far we just released version 0.1 xmlns.ezrss.it/0.1/ – xmlns.ezrss.it/0.1/dtd/ and version 0.2 is already in the pipeline,” he added.

Although the technicalities may not be of interest to most users, everyone who uses RSS feeds on BitTorrent sites will eventually benefit from standardization. It will allow applications to include more options and features, including magnet links and more advanced download ‘rules’ based on the number of seeds and peers.

EZTV’s Novaking further told us that this new standard has been developed with input from other key figures in the BitTorrent community, to guarantee a broad adoption among torrent sites.

“I have talked to quite a few other torrent admins and we are currently coding up an easy to use RSS builder which will generate the RSS feeds using this new namespace, this will allow easy implementation for anyone who wishes to use it,” he said.

The first version of the new spec is now live on ezRSS and users and fellow BitTorrent developers are encouraged to send in their feedback for the next version of the spec. If all goes well the new standard should lead to a wide range of new and exciting RSS tools for torrent users, to make downloading even more convenient and seamless than it already is.

Source: EZTV Introduces BitTorrent RSS Standard, With Magnets

Today, five years later, EZTV has become one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet. With 30 million visitors a month the site is still expanding, and feature-wise the site’s owners also have plans to grow.

One of the new features currently in development is the integration of ezRSS with EZTV’s “my pages” feature. This means that users can setup an RSS feed for their favorite shows on the EZTV website, and use this feed to automatically download new shows.

However, while working on the new features EZTV’s founder realized that the site’s design could also use an overhaul. In recent months a lot of money has been invested on the hardware side, but the design has remained the same. But with some help from the public this may soon change.

“So I have started work on the EZTV codebase, getting ready to implement a whole bunch of new features we hope you will all love, and I thought it was about time to come up with a new visual style to the website,” Novaking writes in an announcement.

“Now this is where it becomes interesting, I’m terrible at graphics/design so I think this could be the best time to see what you loyal fans might be able to do in regards to taking this site to the next level of TV content,” he adds.

True to the sharing nature, the new EZTV design will be crowdsourced. People who want to help out are encouraged to submit their designs, which should be simple and support mobile devices, Google TV and tablets such as the iPad.

TorrentFreak of course asked Novaking to reveal a bit more about the upcoming features that he’s working on, but aside from the ezRSS integration he was reluctant to share his plans. EZTV users will have to be patient and wait for the new features until they are ready to be rolled out.

Source: EZTV Crowdsources New Design, New Features Coming

This week a new application surfaced in the Android Market which aims to make it easier for users to add TV-torrents to their BitTorrent client on the fly.

The free app, named EZTV Droid, displays a list of the latest TV-torrents on EZTV and allows users to add the torrents to uTorrent straight from their Android device.

In addition users can use the app to search for older torrents listed on EZTV. They can also use the app as a remote interface for uTorrent and start, stop, pause or check the status of their current downloads without being near their computer. This only works for users who have the uTorrent WebUI enabled of course.

TorrentFreak got in touch with EZTV Droid’s developer Roy Besiera, who told us that this was his first effort at coding for the Android platform.

“I decided to code the app because I am a huge fan of EZTV. I am actually a web programmer but recently I was able to get a hold of an Android device so I decided to make an app. Actually, EZTV Droid is my first app,” he said.

The current version of EZTV Droid is limited but very effective. In the coming weeks Roy hopes to add several new features, such as the ability to add ‘favorite’ shows and get notifications on new releases based on user preferences. Support for other torrent clients than uTorrent is also high on his list.

“I am planning to add support for other torrent clients as well, first Transmission and the rest,” Roy told TorrentFreak.

The EZTV team is equally excited about the Android app, and encourages developers to come up with more solutions to integrate their site into mobile devices.

“EZTV Droid is a great application showing the versatility of the internet and gadgets available to people in today’s day and age,” EZTV’s NovaKing told us. “With the increase of smart phones and people not being able to watch their shows while they are out they are now able to remotely go in and get the shows they miss.”

“We like apps like this so much that we are starting work on a new API which will allow 3rd party developers to access our data much more easily,” NovaKing added.

The API, which will be released in the near future, will open up a lot of possibilities for developers. It will undoubtedly result in many more dedicated apps and services for the popular TV-torrent site.

Meanwhile, version 1 of EZTV Droid can be downloaded from the Android Market for free. The latest stable version of uTorrent (with the WebUI enabled) is recommended as it’s currently not working correcly on all the latest Beta releases.

Source: EZTV App Arrives on Android, TV Torrents Go Mobile

Thus far there are only a handful of Apps listed in the official store and not all of them are equally usable. To stimulate the development of uTorrent Apps, BitTorrent Inc. started a developers challenge in August, awarding a $1000 prize to the best App to be submitted. Today the winner was announced.

The winning App is called Zulu Music and was developed by Steven Viola. The HTML and Javascript-based App enables users to search for and discover new artists among the 39,229 free albums that are currently available on the music sharing site Jamendo. All albums can be downloaded directly in uTorrent in high quality MP3 and OGG formats.

Zulu Music is a prime example of how free and legal content can be embedded in uTorrent. However, the developer of the App also released another, very similar App that might be of greater use to the average BitTorrent user – Zulu TV.

Zulu TV offers uTorrent users an easy way to find the latest TV-shows, without having to visit a torrent site. The App pulls torrents from EZTV and uses artwork published by TheTVDB and combines them into a nifty TV-torrent guide. With a single click users can subscribe to shows or download individual episodes.

Unlike with Zulu Music, not all copyright holders have given permission to download the content that’s linked to on Zulu TV, and this is most likely the reason why the App has not been given a mention by BitTorrent Inc. People who are interested in trying the App can add it to uTorrent manually by going to the developer’s site.

A third App that came out today is released in collaboration with the organization that hosts the TED conferences. This App enables users to browse through and download high quality copies of all the latest 18-minute TED talks.

“We’re thrilled to collaborate with BitTorrent to bring TEDTalks to millions of new viewers,” June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED Media said. “TED’s mission is to spread ideas, and BitTorrent’s new apps platform will amplify our work really powerfully, reaching a large and engaged audience who may be new to TED.”

A representative from EZTV informed TorrentFreak that he was thrilled about Zulu TV as well, but thus far he hasn’t heard anything from BitTorrent Inc. yet.

“EZTV’s mission is to spread TV-shows, and BitTorrent’s new apps platform will amplify our work really powerfully, reaching a large and engaged audience who may be new to EZTV,” we were told.

Source: uTorrent Gets an EZTV, TED and Jamendo App

Today the group serves more than 16 million visitors a month on its website alone, and a multiple of that on the other torrent sites they distribute their releases on.

Several days ago EZTV’s website suddenly went offline without prior notice, something that usually leads to wild rumors about what the cause. Luckily EZTV’s problems are due to technical problems and they are currently working on a comeback.

EZTV’s Novaking told TorrentFreak that a rebuild of the servers stuffed up and they are currently waiting for some tech people to look into it. It’s not clear when the site will return, but it’s safe to assume that it will be a matter of days, not weeks or months.

This is not the first prolonged outage the popular TV-torrent site has suffered this year. During the summer the website was down for six weeks. It went offline because of hardware problems, but EZTV decided to take advantage of the situation and relocate all hardware to a new datacenter while implementing several new features.

Even though the website is currently offline, EZTV’s releases are still widely available though a number of sites. “You can still get our stuff from Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Twitter and Zoink,” Novaking told TorrentFreak.

Source: EZTV Suffers Downtime Due to Server Troubles

Together with open tracker initiatives like OpenBitTorrent, torrent storage services such as Torrage could provide the building blocks for many new torrent index sites. This week the idea became reality with the launch of Torrage, which is already in use by some of BitTorrent’s most reputable sources.

The site, which also allows individual users to store torrents online, is hosting hundreds of thousands of torrents already. It is currently in use by Suprnova and the new and improved EZTV site. To get started, Torrage has an API and some example code available for torrent sites owners.

Once the torrent files are uploaded they can be accessed through a url that is based on the info_hash value of the torrent. “You can not search or list torrent files that are stored here, you can only access them if you already know the info_hash value of the torrent you want to download,” the Torrage site explains.

TorrentFreak spoke to several torrent site owners who all agreed that it is a welcome addition to the range of tools they have available now, and we can expect to see more sites with Torrage powered download links in the near future.

Without having to operate a tracker and store the .torrent files, maintaining a torrent site will be less complicated and much cheaper. This aside, some might argue that this decentralized setup will reduce the legal liability for site owners since their part in the BitTorrent chain has been significantly reduced.

Whether the various copyright holders and anti-piracy watchdogs such as BREIN, IFPI and the MPAA will agree with this assessment remains to be seen. Regardless of what they think, Torrage is a service that has the potential to help out many torrent sites, old and new.

Source: Torrage: World’s First Torrent Storage Service

Those who try to upload a ‘possibly infringing’ torrent to Mininova get the following message; “Your torrent has been uploaded successfully. It will not appear immediately on the site, as the content will be downloaded first by a third party to check for infringing content. If the content is found to be non-infringing, the torrent will be posted on the site right away.”

Mininova has announced that they are currently testing the removal system with only a few titles, among these are most of the torrents uploaded by the popular scene and release groups. It looks like the removal system checks the info hashes to see if the torrents are on the ban list. If this is indeed the case, the easiest way to get around the filter would be to modify the torrent by adding a small file to the original release and create a new torrent. This new torrent will have an unique info hash and will be accepted by Mininova, until it is blacklisted of course.

This could be the death of scene releases and torrents from popular release groups, since these will be the prime targets of the copyright holders simply because they are downloaded more often than others. This will mean that more exotic and home brewed torrents could remain on Mininova, and will likely be incompatible with the popular releases offered elsewhere, resulting in smaller swarm sizes for Mininova users.

One of the TV release groups that has seen most of its torrents banned from Mininova is EZTV. However, NovaKing, one of the admins at EZTV, is sympathetic towards Mininova, despite the filter. “I can understand why Mininova is going down this path. It is wiser for them to push the initiative and show the content distributors that they are not the bad guys instead of being forced by a judge to more than likely do the same thing in their upcoming court case,” he told us.

“We are not sure how much this affects the TV shows that we release as the filter has only been in effect for a short period of time. But to cater for the users out there that do not know we actually have our own website and only get their shows via Mininova, we have changed how we post our torrents to Mininova,” NovaKing added.

Since Mininova’s content removal tool checks for the info hash of the torrent, they circumvent the system by linking to the ‘infringing’ torrents indirectly. “Now when you see a show from us it will contain a text file which contains a link to a valid torrent file, this will keep us from being filtered as the torrent we post does not contain any copyrighted content.” Of course, the latest torrents and news about EZTV are also posted on Twitter, EZTV’s own website and on many other torrent sites.

Only time will tell how effective the removal system will be, and whether the Mininova team will continue to use it in the future. It is likely that it is a compromise that they were forced to make, as a sign of goodwill towards the copyright holders who they are set to face in court next week. If successful, this test case might be used to pressure other torrent site owners to do the same. We hope, however, that the copyright holders will invest their time and money in serving their customers instead. Opening Hulu up to everyone outside the US might be a good start. Or they perhaps they could license content to Mininova.

Source: Popular Torrents Start to Disappear From Mininova

The most popular copy of the speech comes from the leading TV-torrent distribution group , EZTV. Novaking, one of the admins at EZTV told TorrentFreak that they simply couldn’t ignore this historic presidential election. “It would have been idiotic for us not to supply it,” he said. EZTV had also distributed copies of the debates, but the demand for these didn’t come close to that of Obama’s final speech.

Interest in the speech was not simply limited to the United States. A more detailed look at the geographical location of the people who downloaded the file via BitTorrent, shows that more than half of them come from outside the United States. However, the remaining 46.2% is a significantly greater share for US downloaders than for the average TV-show release.

Although the number of downloads for Obama’s speech were way above that of an average TV-show, it didn’t come close to the numbers of the Olympic opening ceremonies earlier this year. Despite the massive file size of 5GB, the opening ceremonies were downloaded over a million times, mostly by Chinese. The IOC, who owns the right to the broadcast wasn’t too happy about this, and went as far as contacting the Swedish Minister of Justice, to try and get the .torrent file off The Pirate Bay.

Unlike with the Olympics, we haven’t heard about any takedown requests for Obama’s presidential acceptance speech. In fact, if we could ask Obama if we can download a copy for personal use, he will more than likely answer with popular campaign slogan, “Yes we can.”

Source: Obama’s Victory Speech Does Well on BitTorrent

The Swarmplayer EZTV is experimenting with uses slightly modified torrent files (.tstream), which make it possible to stream video files using the BitTorrent protocol. This new technology allows publishers to offer video steams without having to pay for expensive bandwidth. Theoretically, you can watch all torrent files with the player but it’s recommended to use newer releases, as they often offer a higher swarm speed. Streaming the typical TV show will run to around 100kb/sec, a speed unattainable with their older television torrents due in part to the low peer numbers, as much as the larger piece size used in the pre-stream torrents.

Novaking isn’t too worried about the sequential piece transfer, and loss of the tit-for-tat impacting the speeds of the swarm for those not trying to stream. “The spread will be so wide in the first week,” he tells us, “that it won’t affect it greatly. Of course it’s impossible to tell until it’s fully live and working.” Currently, only their own torrents will be available via .tstream files, but the hope is that should the test prove successful during the next week, to have them for the torrents from their partner sites, such as MVgroup as well.

BitTorrent streaming is the ideal low-cost distribution model for online video. Here at TorrentFreak we have been testing out the Swarmplayer since its very early beta days with Mininova, and it does look to be a very promising development. However, the client does not (yet) have an option to keep a fully saved copy of the file on your system for later re-watching, and it also doesn’t allow you to change the port it uses. But these are minor issues that should be solved easily.

It is interesting to see that this multi-million dollar research project collaborates with torrent sites like Mininova, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC. Could this be the future of television? It is at least a possibility, and something for major networks to look at, as some already are (the BBC is a member of the group behind P2PNext, for example). EZTV’s Novaking certainly seems to think so. “We are hoping that TV networks start seeing this as a method to provide people with what they want”.

Source: EZTV Trials TV-Torrent Streaming

It seems to be an agreement that benefits both sides. MVGroup gets the exposure of EZTV’s fanbase, and several new seeders. EZTV on the other hand, expand their list of shows. This is particularly important at this time of year when most US shows have finished for the season, leaving them light on torrent releases, although EZTV admins claim this was incidental, and not planned.

MVGroup admins told TorrentFreak “[we] would like to take this opportunity to thank EZTV in helping us continue our founders legacy, to spread high quality educational material via p2p, to everyone, everywhere, for free and with no ratio.”

With the first shared releases out and available, we shall see with interest how well this works, especially if MVGroup sourced shows (what should we call them? MVTV? EZMV?) appear on our new Top TV shows lists.

Source: EZTV and MVGroup Join Forces

“We decided to move to the desert of Sinai in Egypt since we feel that we’ll be safe there.” Connectivity in Egypt should be uncongested, with only about 1 in 13 of the population regular net users, despite modern infrastructure investments by Telecom Egypt. Meanwhile, the sun should do wonders to counter the typical pasty-faced stereotype of the typical computer addict.

In other news, there’s egg on the face of ABC, as a pre-air episode of the popular TV-show “Lost” hit the net. Apparently, the episode is from a DVD screener, and proves, yet again, that the problems come from members of the industry, who are often claimed to be the victims.

There is more breaking news today, as the popular OiNK replacement Waffles.fm now accepts new members. For months thousands of users have waited to get an account at the popular private BitTorrent tracker, and today this may become reality.

Unfortunately, things have not been so rosy for all BitTorrent sites. BT-chat, a popular torrent site has closed it’s torrent operations, to concentrate on its Bluetooth based IM client.

BT-Chat owner NBtX told TorrentFreak ” Server costs we’re starting to get too much, and the ads were making everyone mad. We have since then decided to stop providing torrents, and focus solely on the Bluetooth instant messaging program.”

However, the worst news comes for users of the private BitTorrent tracker BitHQ. Like EliteTorrents before them, they have been raided and shut down by US Federal Officers. No comment from any party involved has been forthcoming so far.

What a day….

Source: The Pirate Bay Moves to Egyptian Desert Island

It’s understandable why the BitTorrent community feels a bit jittery this week after the shock demise of the OiNK tracker, particularly when another top site seemingly disappeared today.

Back in March we described EZTV as ‘the leading TV-torrent distribution group’ so when people tried to access www.eztvefnet.org today and got simply directed back to Google, panic started to creep in.

Luckily, this error is the result of some administrative issues and EZTV is alive, well and offering this message to their users:

Due to some misunderstandings during the transfers of domains relating to EZTV, the domain www.eztvefnet.org has been temporarily lost and now appears to redirect to a google query for EZTV. While we are working on resolving this issue, please be advised that there are alternative domains leading to our site – www.eztv.it and www.eztv.nl

NovaKing, admin at EZTV told TorrentFreak: “We are currently having some dns issues with eztvefnet.org so would like to inform our loyal fans that we prefer for people to start using the shorter easier to remember domain names!”

Source: EZTV Now Accessible Under New Domain Names