If you have been watching what is happening in the Bittorrent world, many of the sites are starting to open up their own streaming video sites to go along with the basic Bittorrent tracking systems. The Pirate Bay has their own streaming video site here that is not safe for work, and news from Torrent Freak is that Mininova is also opening up their own streaming video site over here.
Streaming video as an alternative to Bittorrent, or Joost/Veoh type systems for content delivery takes a lot of the waiting out of the equation. It also takes a lot of the misnaming and false file issues out of the equation as well. With streaming video, you basically see what you are getting before you devote the bandwidth to watch it, no surprise porn.
Depending on what is uploaded, the copyright folks might not be breathing down folks necks to shut it down either.
Techwag is seeing this as both a business opportunity and a survival mechanism for the pirate bay and for Mininova. On one side, you make it easier for the customer to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it (personally, we would love to see this same kind of philosophy out of the major channels) as well as remove the waiting time that is the hallmark of traditional Bittorrent and P2P systems.
The Pirate Bay has also opened up an image storage system (although they ask that you don’t dump porn on it), and a store where you can buy pirate bay merchandise. The branching out from just being a tracker is also good business, either way the pirate bay will have businesses in both sides of the legal/illegal process. If the pirate bay ever really does get shut down, then they will still have something to work with that allows them to build out their business and skill keep on making money.
Watching Mininova go down the same path means that other Bittorrent sites are also probably going to follow along, maybe not in the same way, but using the skills, knowledge and technology back ends they have built up to serve Bittorrent files to also have business in the legal internet world.
The other question then is, is this the writing on the wall, or is streaming video set to replace Bittorrent?
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[…] part is the way that the pirate bay is expanding their empire. While we made the observation here that Bittorrent, sites were either developing their own streaming TV sites (like Mininova here […]
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