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KickassTorrents wears the piracy crown despite crackdown

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Tormund Giantsbane fighting against Ramsay Bolton's overwhelming forces

Tormund Giantsbane fighting against Ramsay Bolton's overwhelming forces Photo: HBO Foxtel

As another season of Game of Thrones approaches its finale, legit streaming services have failed to slake our thirst for piracy – with KickassTorrents becoming one of the world's most popular websites.

While The Pirate Bay tends to make more headlines, efforts to knock it offline last year saw rival KickassTorrents steal its crown as the world's most popular BitTorrent search engine, according to Amazon's web traffic tracker Alexa.

The site's popularity continues to grow, with KickassTorrents now becoming one of Alexa's highest-ever ranking file-sharing sites – hitting 70th spot to surpass the The Pirate Bay's high of 76th spot. It's a blow to global pirate hunters who have struggled in vain to block access to BitTorrent search engines and chase down users.

So what's the key to KickassTorrents' success? File-sharing news site TorrentFreak attributes it to impressive indexing, a slick interface, fast page load times and a vibrant user community – an overall user-friendliness valued by both paying customers and pirates.

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It could also be KickassTorrents' decision to stick with downloadable .torrent files while many other BitTorrent search engines have abandoned them in favour of magnetic links.

As The Pirate Bay can attest, becoming the world's most popular BitTorrent search engine isn't necessarily a good thing, attracting a lot more attention from the copyright police. KickassTorrents has changed its domain name several times to stay ahead of the game but hasn't faced the same down-time issues as The Pirate Bay.

KickassTorrents has already been name-checked in Australian efforts to force ISPs to block access to BitTorrent search engines. The site has also joined The Pirate Bay in offering access on the dark web via the TOR browser, making it much harder for the service to be blocked completely.

Australia's anti-piracy efforts are in disarray with the Dallas Buyers Club case thrown out, the three-strikes laws abandoned and site blocking yet to take effect.

As another season of Game of Thrones approaches its finale, we seem no closer to defeating piracy. How are you watching Game of Thrones this season? What would it take for content providers to win back Aussie pirates?

 

36 comments so far

  • We had Foxtel for Sport and so it was easy to add the Drama package for 3 months for GoT. I watch the first 15 minutes of each GoT live streamed to Foxtel Go at morning tea time. It works well even on Optus 3G. And then I finish GoT off at lunch time also using Foxtel Go - on demand. Their team have been getting pretty fast at making it available on demand.

    And, no, I don't work for Foxtel.

    Commenter
    Douglas
    Location
    Sydney
    Date and time
    June 20, 2016, 3:04PM

    • It's too late.. the shark has been jumped. You can't continue to offer substandard service, pricing and outdated distribution models and then hope that people won't find a better way.

      Commenter
      Yarrgh
      Date and time
      June 20, 2016, 3:17PM

      • It's not rocket science:

        1. Prompt ability to download. Not locked up in exclusivity deals with the likes of Foxtel. Let them have first show, but have the episodes downloadable immediately after screening - not having to wait until teh end of season.

        2. Reasonable price per episode. $2 - $3 per episode seems fair.

        3. No DRM. Do not make me download the file to play only on certain devices. Like music, let me download a good quality hi-res version (say MP4) that I can play on any of my devices/Tvs?etc. as I choose. that is let em OWN what I buy.

        Simples!

        Commenter
        Fed-Up
        Date and time
        June 20, 2016, 3:23PM

        • I have no sympathy for Australian content providers. I refuse to be blackmailed into subscribing to Foxtel just to watch GofT. I will wait for the release on iTunes, and resolutely ignore spoilers until then, but have a complete understanding for pirates.

          Commenter
          AndrewT
          Location
          Sydney
          Date and time
          June 20, 2016, 3:24PM

          • Thanks for the reminder. I knew that there was something I wanted to do this afternoon. :-)

            Commenter
            Bob.H
            Location
            Central Coast NSW
            Date and time
            June 20, 2016, 3:51PM

            • What would it take for content providers to win back Aussie pirates?

              Simple. Cheap and plentiful. Same day release of ALL shows. No exclusives with one provider.

              Commenter
              Andrew
              Date and time
              June 20, 2016, 4:04PM

              • I've bought DRM content before which no longer works - for some reason my computer refuses to play it. I thinks the monitor is not HDCP compliant when the same computer and monitor worked before.

                So I'll never buy DRM content again. Content providers need to give the customer a choice which is as good as easily downloaded content - no ads, no forced viewing, no device restrictions.

                Commenter
                Dale
                Location
                Melbourne
                Date and time
                June 20, 2016, 4:08PM

                • I know it isn't legal, but a downloaded 1-2Mb video file is just a far superior product to a DVD (why oh why do you get ads and have to flick through minutes of crap when you've paid good money?) or streaming which can be erratic. Plus once you have the file downloaded you can watch it over and over so easily - which if you have kids you know is important. If it wasn't for having to press next, next, next and taking 5 minutes to load, i would have been happy buying DVDs.

                  Commenter
                  WT
                  Date and time
                  June 20, 2016, 4:17PM

                  • If Foxtel had GoT and Sports available on a stable Netflix like platform for $10 a month, even $15/month I'd be on board, but never with their current pricing and infrastructure.

                    Commenter
                    Paul
                    Date and time
                    June 20, 2016, 4:19PM

                    • Which would be great but Foxtel pay more than $15 a month per subscriber for the live sport. Look at Optus wanting $15 a month for the EPL. Foxtel is bad in many ways but if you watch numerous different sports its a good deal. Overall though its pretty expensive, I think the movies and TV channels in general are too expensive and maybe they could offer a sports lite pack with say just a few sports channels instead of the 11+ they have now.

                      Commenter
                      Justin
                      Date and time
                      June 20, 2016, 6:34PM

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