Monday, Sep 22, 2008    Text size: 

Tech writer Don Reisinger of TechCrunch.com cited an anonymous tipster who revealed that the leading BitTorrent tracker may start offering full movies for online streaming.

Reisinger noted that a preliminary version of the streaming service was shortly posted online and he linked to a cached version of it.

The preliminary version presents full-length, first-run Hollywood releases in a large bank of hyperlinked movie posters. Right now, clicking on any of the posters takes users to a text-only page that thanks the public for its positive response to the beta launch of the streaming service.

Reisinger noted that moving to streaming might be the best way for The Pirate Bay to stay alive in a changing online climate.

"The Pirate Bay may be on to something with its P2P streaming," he said. "P2P downloading has always been the toast of the town in the piracy community, but the next stage may be a move towards streaming, which makes it easier for users to watch movies and TV shows. And if that will really happen, it only makes sense for The Pirate Bay to lead the way."

It's also worth noting that this might be a natural move for Torrent sites as some ISPs start putting caps on how much information consumers can upload and download from the Internet. Comcast enacted a 250 GB cap last month, which many online analysts saw as a direct move against Torrent users.

In addition, tech writer Steve Gillmor said that bandwidth caps might herald a new era when users stream content instead of downloading it. He said that Microsoft's new media program Silverlight, a competitor to Adobe's Flash, might help make this happen.

"The advent of new look-ahead streaming capabilities in Silverlight suggest that streaming can accommodate DVR-like functionality that makes the value proposition of 'owning' the data on a local drive much less important," he wrote on TechCrunch.com.