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EZTV is a TV torrent distribution group founded in May 2005 and dissolved in April 2015, after a hostile takeover of their domains and brand by "EZCLOUD LIMITED". It quickly became the most visited torrent site for TV shows.


History


Founding

It was founded in response to the forced disappearance of TVTorrents.tv and btefnet via lawsuit. The group was founded by NovaKing with a loose coalition of volunteers and held no formal ties to its predecessors. In the aftermath of the takedown of TVTorrents and btefnet, the
BitTorrent BitTorrent is a Protocol (computing), communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a Decentralised system, decentralized manner. The protocol is d ...
community felt a need for a site that moderated its content. The two groups were known to never provide any fake links, a problem that used to be quite prevalent on public bittorrent sites prior to improvements in community-powered filtering in recent years. A group of volunteers gathered in the
IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...
channel #EZTV on the
EFnet EFnet or Eris-Free network is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users. It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network. History Initially, most IRC servers formed a single IRC network, to which new se ...
IRC network to create a TV torrent group from scratch in order to fill this void in the public bittorrent scene. The idea behind EZTV was to create a group that would pick up where its two predecessors left off while avoiding what they considered the "weak spots" that had brought them down. This meant that EZTV should never host its own torrent files, its leadership structure should be dynamic and opaque to avoid presenting any obvious target for litigation, and the group should not host or run its own tracker. In addition, it was decided that EZTV should be a purely non-profit group by never asking for money of any kind from its users and to never have advertisements to avoid "profiting from piracy" litigation. This means that EZTV was run entirely on a volunteer basis. This clean, no-ads profile of EZTV has made the site a popular destination for the public torrent scene.


EZTVEFNET.org

During its first years of operation, EZTV hosted its site under the domain name eztvefnet.org. However, in October 2007 that domain began redirecting to a
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
query for "eztv". Citing "administrative issues", EZTV had lost control over that domain and has redirected users to eztv.it. After the Italian authorities took down the EZTV.it domain, users were directed towards eztv.ch. In April 2008 the old domain name was parked and taken over by a different site.


Stability issues

By many accounts, EZTV was for a few years plagued with several periods of – sometimes prolonged –
downtime In computing and telecommunications, downtime (also (system) outage or (system) drought colloquially) is a period when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is ...
.


Piratebay Raid

On 9 December 2014,
The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of Film, movies, music, video games, Pornographic film, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank , The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection ...
was raided by the
Swedish police The Swedish Police Authority () is the national police, police force (''Polisen'') of Sweden. The first modern police force in Sweden was established in the mid-19th century, and the police remained in effect under Municipalities of Sweden, local ...
, who seized servers, computers, and other equipment and resulted in EZTV going down. By the 11th of December, EZTV was releasing torrents again although the main site was not yet accessible with the regular domain, however the site could be reached through eztv proxy sites. As of 22 December 2014 EZTV was accessible again through the EZTV.ch domain for some weeks.


Hostile takeover

Since October 2007, EZTV was using the EZTV.it domain name. But under pressure from copyright holders, the Italian .it registry lodged a complaint over some paperwork. Facing a possible confiscation of the EZTV.it domain name, they saw no other option than to switch to a new domain. The EZTV.it domain name was suspended, and a couple of months later was taken over by scammers attempting to claim EZTV as their own. But unlike the real EZTV this .it domain opens windows with advertisements. As of 25 April 2015, the EZTV.ch and the EZTV-Proxy.net the "semi" accepted proxy are under control of "EZCLOUD LIMITED". Simultaneously with the takeover of the EZTV.ch domain and the EZTV-Proxy.net proxy, the scam group "EZCLOUD LIMITED" started attempts to take over the online identities by impersonating them on their own clone of the original websites, further assimilating the brand name and disrupting the workings and communication of the original group and attempting to gain revenue via an unofficial EZTV
Bitcoin Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under ...
and adverts on these hijacked sites. "EZCLOUD LIMITED" gained access to the EZTV.se domain via the registrar and reset Novaking's information allowing them access to the domain accounts for EZTV, using this access they hijacked the EZTV domains and locked Novaking out. The original EZTV domain was under EZCLOUD LIMITED's control around 29 April 2015. The topic of the
IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...
channel where EZTV was discussed was set to: "DO NOT USE THE SITES! They are not ours anymore. Thanks for all the fish." Around 5 May 2015 Rarbg, BT-Chat, and other sites removed EZTV as an affiliate and took steps to stop indexing "EZCLOUD LIMITED" releases. KickassTorrents, BT-Chat and
The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of Film, movies, music, video games, Pornographic film, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank , The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection ...
suspended or deactivated the official EZTV accounts and added warnings to the old releases, ex-EZTV staff continue their warnings that people should avoid the scam site that is left behind.


Aftermath

After the original owner NovaKing and his staff called it quits after the hostile takeover, the EZTV branding was used by the members of EZCLOUD LIMITEDEZ under the domain EZTV.io. In 2020 this domain was disabled due to disputes due to which EZTV switched to a new domain. This resulted in it being blocked in
Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
due to it being on the same
Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc., is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, wide area network services, reverse proxies, Domain Name Service, ICANN-accredited domain registration, and other se ...
IP Address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...
as
The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of Film, movies, music, video games, Pornographic film, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank , The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection ...
. This was later resolved with EZTV being moved to a different IP address.


Former partners

Over the years, EZTV has participated in several partnerships.


EZTV and VTV

Initially, EZTV and fellow TV torrent distribution group VTV acted as competition across the board but with different approaches. Over time, however, it has become clear that the two groups cooperate in some ways since VTV distributes releases that EZTV does not do via EZTV's IRC channel and website.


EZTV and MVGroup

In summer of 2008, EZTV and the documentary torrent distribution group MVGroup initiated a partnership that saw MVG's torrents distributed by EZTV on their IRC channel and website. The agreement benefited both sides, as MVG gained increased exposure and a vastly improved seeder base while EZTV expanded the list of shows available through them. In a statement to TorrentFreak, MVGroup admins said they "would like to take this opportunity to thank EZTV in helping us continue our founder's legacy, to spread high quality educational material via p2p, to everyone, for free (...)". One month prior to this announcement, MVG's founder Merrin had died after prolonged illness.


EZTV and VODO

The Creative Commons media distributor
VODO VODO was an online media distributor offering films, books, games and music under pay-what-you-want pricing models. Founded by film director Jamie King, VODO has recently focused on bundle offers, bringing together a variety of creators under t ...
has for a long time held a prominent position on the EZTV site. EZTV was one of the first torrent groups to offer VODO exposure to their audience, along with
The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of Film, movies, music, video games, Pornographic film, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank , The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection ...
, Mininova,
isoHunt isoHunt was an online torrent files index and repository, where visitors could browse, search, download or upload torrents of various digital content of mostly entertainment nature. The website was taken down in October 2013 as a result of a l ...
and others.


April Fools

One notable exception to the no-fakes mechanic was a 2008 April Fools' Day prank, where a release was posted on EZTV's website purporting to be a DVD screener pre-air release of an episode of the TV-show '' Lost''. This episode was, in fact, an episode of ''
Flavor of Love ''Flavor of Love'' is an American reality television dating game show starring Flavor Flav of the rap group Public Enemy. While not a direct spin-off, the show was a result of Brigitte Nielsen and Flavor Flav's failed relationship on ''Strange ...
'' with an edit at the beginning saying "April Fool's". A year after the Lost pre-air incident, the group replaced their site with a service dedicated to sports related shows – EZSports. In the aftermath of this prank, many users actually wanted the group to let the EZSports site stay online and be provided as a parallel service to the regular EZTV. The group was initially positive to the idea, but a lack of volunteers to maintain the site stopped it in its tracks. In 2012 the group pulled another April Fools' Day prank on the community. This time they renamed their releases with the extension .rm (
RealMedia RealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format (digital), container format created by RealNetworks with the filename extension . RealMedia is used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio, while also being used for Streaming media, st ...
) and posted an announcement on the site explaining they had changed the format of their releases in response to "all the comments people have been leaving on our forums" after the Scene changed the encoding of their releases in the weeks prior to the prank.


ISP Blockade

EZTV and its
RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...
website ezRSS are currently blocked by multiple ISPs in Italy and in the UK at request from
MPA MPA or mPa may refer to: Academia Academic degrees * Master of Performing Arts * Master of Professional Accountancy * Master of Public Administration * Master of Public Affairs Schools * Mesa Preparatory Academy * Morgan Park Academy * M ...
and
FACT A fact is a truth, true data, datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance. Standard reference works are often used to Fact-checking, check facts. Science, Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by ...
. As of August 2017, Australian ISP's have also blocked EZTV, amongst others.


See also

*
Comparison of BitTorrent sites This is a comparison of BitTorrent websites that includes most of the most popular sites. These sites typically contain multiple torrent files and an index of those files. Features * BitTorrent sites may operate a BitTorrent tracker and are o ...
* * Websites blocked in the United Kingdom


References

{{BitTorrent File sharing networks Defunct BitTorrent websites Internet properties established in 2005