One of the most popular and well-known torrent distribution sites in the world, EZTV, has closed down. Surprisingly, it had nothing to do with the cops, or lawyers.
As TorrentFreak report, the site — which has served up TV show downloads for a decade — has been brought down by scammers, who took over EZTV’s domain name in what’s being calling a “hostile takeover”.
The scammers are still trying to operate EZTV, but given the nature of their takeover — company names were impersonated, and even the personal domains of EZTV’s founder Novaking have been seized — many other major torrent sites like KickassTorrents have banned EZTV uploads, and everyone’s being urged to avoid the site like the plague.
EZTV rose to prominence over the years due to its simple design and clear goal: to host episodes of every major (Western) TV show on the air. By only linking trusted and quality torrents, it developed a reputation as the place to go to get hold of a TV show.
As sad as it is for the site to get hit like this, maybe it’s a good time to go out. Ten years ago getting hold of TV shows in a timely manner was a pain in the arse! These days, between Apple, Google and myriad streaming services there’s really not many excuses left for not being able to pay for a show.
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43 responses to “RIP EZTV”
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Username checks out…
Oh no 🙁
Except for budget.
and ridiculous licensing arrangements – cough *Powers*
Luke is ‘merican. He doesn’t understand the licensing plights of us Aussies.
He lives in Australia. Just writes for the US site.
But it says US Edition on his profile? I’m so confuzzled :'(
Essentially Kotaku US and Kotaku AU are two websites that sort of share content (there’s also other regions like Kotaku UK, China, etc). It’s mostly a case of the Australian website taking articles directly from the other Kotaku websites and mixing it in with their own locally produced articles (which is why sometimes you’ll see a weird error or the values won’t be converted to Australian measurements). Luke Plunkett writes for the American website as their nighttime reporter while living in Australia (which makes sense considering the website tries to cover the news 24-7 and our timezone is when the US team are sleeping).
You can generally tell where the article came from because authors for the Australian website have little icons next to their byline. On the main page right now you can see Mark Serrels and Campbell Simpson’s articles to see what I mean.
There’s also a bit of a difference in the content. Where the US website tries to cover every single thing that happens and pump out as many articles as possible as quickly as possible, the Australian team write longer, more filled out articles to complement the news. So if you pay attention you’ll see Luke Plunkett has lots of short articles that are basically a paragraph of text, an image and a link to something else, where Mark Serrels has a lot of much longer articles that don’t really talk about anything current, but are super interesting to read. That doesn’t make Luke terrible, it’s just sort of a different job with a different goal.
Gotcha, thanks. I knew Mark was from here but got confused with Luke because of the article style and location exactly as you said. Still doesn’t change the fact we still get shafted here hahaha.
…and geo blocking
…and requiring 20 services to get everything you want across all channels….
Yerp this.
Although I can afford it there’s no way I’m going to try and manage all shows I watch across 5 or 6 services, across 3 or 4 devices.
And purely having the content available
Except for the plethora of reasons to not purchase them via legal means in Australia.
Is this just the .it site or the .ch as well?!?
Are they both the same?
Are you sure thats right?
I know scammers got hold of eztv.it, but i thought they moved to eztv.ch?
They’ve taken over both now. I think they are trying to continue running it but who knows how safe their uploads are
That is what I thought as well. It seems eztv.it was lost about a month ago and they re-launched on eztv.ch and it has been fine, up to 4 hours ago there were still TV shows being uploaded.
Either this is new news or some people didn’t get the mail on the domain change.
NovaKing as acknowledged that .ch is taken over by scammers too.
You can tell, if you dont have ad blocker on and go there there are some deadly pop-ups.
Check out bt-chat if you want a good source, as they pool from many and also have an RSS feed.
I for one, will be having a beer for them tonight 🙁
Aye, me too.
Brave warriors, been faithful to their cause for many years.
Alternatives? Specifically it’s show management feature “my page”
rarbg.com is what I’ve been using for quite a while now.
Kickass.to?
I think they use Kat.cr now
Netflix 🙂
“there’s really not many excuses left for not being able to pay for a show.”
Sure I can pay for a show.
But I can’t watch it on my shit connection.
Torrents are the only way for me to reliably watch a show.
I grabbed a few torrents from there recently and they were fine.
Any idea what the scammers end game is?
Downloaded some episodes from that site last night but I think I’ll just use it to see when shows are coming back from now on just to be on the safe side.
Control of a highly trafficked website with login credentials that most users would be pretty relaxed about? With all of those users downloading whatever you put up?
Whatever their endgame, it’s one I’d rather not be a part of.
My login credentials and username for that site are completely unique. I think there may be add pop ups but adblock kills them before they hit me.
I’ll have to start looking at alternatives.
I’ve never registered or logged in there… it hasn’t prevented me from using it.
*ahem* While I’ve never actually engaged the services of this site or any other site like it, I’m sure that, hypothetically, if I had made use of such a site, then I would also have had no issues using it without registering or logging in *awkward cough* Nor would I have noticed anything out of the ordinary with anything that I might have downloaded in recent weeks. If I had downloaded anything in recent weeks. Which I haven’t. Obviously. *shifty look*
Well if we’re talking about some planet x hypothetical world, I would say I would have had the same experience… had I done any of those things in this hypothetical world
EZTV were one of the bests. I don’t pirate often but when I do it was usually them.
I loved them for TV, it was the place to go for Lost, but over the past few years I felt they got sloppy and started having too many technical problems. It’s a shame because the concept is brilliant and they had it working well for ages. It’s just TV, it’s got the schedule in the corner, it’s all uniform, the shows are labelled properly, it focused on current episodes rather than collections or working out of sequence to add older shows, the quality is good but it’s not box set good so there’s a reason to go out and spend money on the show when that option was available. It was basically the ideal place for people who only pirate TV. No porn, no movies, no programs. Just a semi-trustable source for getting shows before they could be spoiled.
Screw you ‘merica. It’s not easy this side of the pacific goddamnit -_-
That’s a shame, because they were one of the best due to their “semi-curated” lists, which only had one SD and one HD version of each episode (usually of good quality), grouped episodes by show name and offered air dates and such. Made it really simple to check out what shows were new, and keep track of which shows were on what episode and so forth.
Other sites like Kickass and TPB are just a giant mishmash of random links to who knows what. For EG, when I tried to look for a Top Gear episode recently (before the end) it took me nine or so links to magnets before I actually found one with the episode that the link claimed to be…
Kickass have a pretty good system for tv shows, shows have their own pages with episode lists that expand to reveal all the different versions available.
I was reasonably certain that they’d closed down months ago.
So wait, one of the most popular illegal file sharing websites in the world, has been taken over…….. by scammers?
It was that easy?
The worlds best law enforcement agencies have been trying to take it down for years, but it ultimately succumbed to scammers. Why don’t they just employ some scammers to take all the others down?
I don’t even understand how scammers could do it.