EZTV: Difference between revisions

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EZTV

File:EZTV screenshot.png
Type of site	Torrent index, magnet links provider
Available in	English
URL	eztv.it
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Current status	Online

EZTV is the name of a TV torrent distribution group founded in May 2005 as a response to the forced disappearance of TVTorrents.tv and btefnet via lawsuit.^[2][3] The group was founded by a loose coalition of volunteers and holds no formal ties to its predecessors.

In the aftermath of the takedown of TVT and btefnet, the BitTorrent 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 channel #EZTV on the EFnet 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 is 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.

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 query for "eztv". Citing "administrative issues", EZTV had lost control over that domain and now redirected its users to the new domain name of eztv.it – which it has held since.^[4]

In April 2008 the old domain name was parked and taken over by a different site.

By many accounts, EZTV was for a few years plagued with several periods of – sometimes prolonged – downtime.^[5]

This is usually attributed to the fact that since EZTV is run on a volunteer basis with severely limited resources, the strain of the traffic seen by the site will sometimes overwhelm their servers.

However, over the years many updates and improvements have been made to the EZTV back-end which has resulted in relatively decent stability. In addition, EZTV is not really dependent on their site – the group will always continue to release their torrents via their IRC channel, their Twitter feed and on other torrent indexes.

One notable exception to this no-fakes mechanic is the April Fools' Day joke played in 2008, 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 with an edit at the beginning saying "April Fools".^[6][7]

On April 1, 2009, one year after the Lost pre-air incident, the group replaced their site with a service dedicated to sports related shows – EZSports.^[8] 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 once again pulled an April fools joke on the community. This time they renamed their releases with the extension .rm (RealMedia) 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.^[9]

Over the years, EZTV has participated in several partnerships.

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.

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 (...)".^[10]

One month prior to this announcement, MVG's founder Merrin had died after prolonged illness.^[11]

The Creative Commons media distributor VODO 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, Mininova, isoHunt and others.^[12]

EZTV and its RSS website ezRSS are currently blocked by multiple ISPs in the UK at request from MPA and FACT.^[13][14][15]

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