As a teenager Andrej founded Suprnova.org, which once was the most popular BitTorrent site on the Internet.

Andrej’s currently living in San Fransisco where he produces TorrentFreak TV and several other great shows for his new web video portal.

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

In the months that followed Suprnova grew out to become the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, with over a million visitors a day. But as with many other BitTorrent sites it didn’t last. Along with huge popularity came the legal threats, and these eventually made Andrej decide to close the site in December 2004.

In 2007, Suprnova returned to the BitTorrent stage, resurrected by the folks behind The Pirate Bay who were offered the domain by Andrej. Unfortunately, the site never even came close to its former glory, with just a few thousand visitors passing by each month.

Last year Andrej decided to ask the domain back, as he wanted to use it for a new project. As he’s currently in San Francisco and attending the Academy of Art University where he focuses on TV and online video production, Andrej decided to use the Suprnova brand for his very own video portal.

The new Suprnova officially launched a few days ago, and we decided to catch up with Andrej – who’s also the director of TorrentFreak TV – to see what it’s all about.

“SuprNova.org is creating entertaining content which is given to users free of charge,” Andrej told us. “It is licensed under Creative Commons with the idea that everyone has the chance to view the content at any time, however they wish.”

“We do not believe that giving away everything for free is bad. We do not believe that re-distributing shows is bad. We believe in the free flow of information. We believe in a world where a copy does not equal lost profit,” he added.

The video portal features unique short format videos produced by and for Suprnova.org. The videos can be streamed online, and true to the BitTorrent roots of the site a .torrent download is also offered for each show.

“We know that you might be on your 5-minute break and want to watch something that is going to make you laugh. That is why we are dedicated to making shows, which are no longer than 3 minutes. Ideally they range from 15 to 45 seconds long.”

TorrentFreak TV is one of the shows that are featured on the site, and although we haven’t seen a new episode in months, it’s good to see it listed there. In the coming weeks Andrej and his team will focus on releasing more unique content.

“New content will be added daily and we want users to be able to find something new on the website every time they come. As the site grows, the production of the shows will increase new shows will be released more often,” Andrej said.

What was once the largest BitTorrent index has now returned as a modest video portal, but one with great aspirations. We do of course wish Andrej, Stacia and the rest of the team the very best and we’re looking forward to seeing some new TorrentFreak TV episodes on Suprnova in the near future.

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

In a response to this breaking news, the former owner of Suprnova told TorrentFreak why he decided to donate the domain: “The domain was doing nothing. I know that domain has some nostalgic value and some people would be more then happy to see it back online. I don’t use it, and TPB is the only team that I know will use it correctly.”

“I will be involved in the community [Forums] on a separated domain”, Sloncek said and added, “The site has to look almost exactly like it looked before. They can upgrade it, but they cannot change it appearance completely. We further agreed that the site has to be community orientated (not private).”

Together with the relaunch of Suprnova, which will be a torrent indexer and not have it’s own tracker, a new community will be launched that will be linked to both Suprnova and The Pirate Bay. The forums will be hosted on SuprBay.org and are already up and running (more or less).

We also talked to Brokep, one of The Pirate Bay administrators and asked him why they decided to revive Suprnova. He told us: “We talked it over and decided it was
something people would have use for, it would help the torrent community and it would also signal that if you shut one down it will get back up again.”

Here’s a preview of the updated Suprnova logo. The new site is scheduled to go live this week!

For the people who are relatively new to BitTorrent, here’s a brief history of Suprnova (previously posted here).

The Rise of Suprnova.

Suprnova.org launched in the fall of 2002. At that time it was one of the few BitTorrent sites on the Internet. Suprnova was founded by Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager better known as Sloncek. Initially he wanted to name the site Supernova, but that name was already taken.

Suprnova.org started as a fun project, with a very primitive setup. In fact, it was hosted on a linux box at Sloncek’s home in the early days. As soon as Suprnova was ready to go public, he started to advertise the site among friends and on IRC, and it slowly started to attract more and more visitors.

The word about the “universal BitTorrent source” spread like wildfire. It was no surprise that it didn’t take long before the traffic generated by Suprnova was maxing out the meager 16kb/s upload capacity.

The increased popularity of Suprnova came around the same time when other torrent sites like donkax.com, bytemonsoon.com and torrentse.cx, decided to quit. These sites were more or less forced to go offline, either due to bandwidth constraints, or cease and desist letters. But Suprnova made it very clear that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Suprnova continued to grow, and Sloncek spent most of the time looking for mirrors, to guarantee that the site stayed in the air. At it’s top it indexed almost 60.000 torrents and about 1.5 million visitors per day. Suprnova had a very active community, and its forum was among the biggest on the Internet.

The fall of Suprnova.

In November 2004 Suprnova’s ISP told Sloncek that the servers were taken into custody by the Slovenian police. The raid was initiated by the French anti-piracy lobby RetSpan. The police never contacted Sloncek about this personally, but is was a sign that things were about to change.

Around the same time Reuters wrote about Sloncek in one of their articles, which soon after spread out to the Slovenian press. This was the turning point for Sloncek. He later said: “So I ended up reading about myself in Slovenian newspapers. And right about that time, I had a feeling something was wrong. I do not really know what the feeling was or where it was coming from, but I decided it was time to take SuprNova.org offline.”

Sloncek eventually pulled the plug December 19, 2004, which marked the end of an era.

October 18, 2005, almost a year after the servers were raided, Sloncek received a letter form the prosecutor stating that the charges against him were dropped. This was a great relief, and he later said: “This has been a huge pressure on me and I think it left some permanent marks on me. I hope none of you will ever have to go through something like this.”

Early 2006 Suprnova.org shortly resurrected as a P2P news site, but that project ended after a couple of months.

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