EZTV
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Type of site
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Torrent index, magnet links provider |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Commercial | Yes (Advertisements) |
| Current status | Closed - hijacked clone exists on domain |
EZTV was 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 was founded in response to the forced disappearance of TVTorrents.tv and btefnet via lawsuit. 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 TVTorrents 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 has redirected users to eztv.it. After the Italian authorities took down the EZTV.it domain, users were directed towards eztv.ch, until the eventual demise.
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.
On 9 December 2014, The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police, who seized servers, computers, and other equipment and resulted in EZTV going down.
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Wikipedia