Hey!Watch has really simplified the whole process of sharing a video over BitTorrent. Once you enter the YouTube URL on the site, it’ll fetch the video and create a torrent out of it. The only catch is that you must be using a BitTorrent client like Azureus or BitTornado, that supports the webseeding protocol.

How legal the service Hey!Watch offers is has yet to be questioned, but I doubt scraping video sharing sites like YouTube and offering videos for download, normally or over BitTorrent, is in accordance with those sites’ terms of service agreements. A while ago, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was sent a cease and desist letter for putting up a YouTube download tool on his site.

The problem with Hey!Watch is that after you encode a certain number of videos, it asks you to upgrade your account, which costs, at a minimum, $4.99 a month. Free accounts are limited to 10 encodings per month, and all videos can’t be longer than 10 minutes. I guess I can see how something like this might be useful, but personally, I’d much rather just use the VideoDownloader Firefox extension or an application like PodTube. Everything doesn’t need BitTorrent.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.