Put.io

[gfunk911]

I use and love put.io. Completely hassle free. I'd never go back.

The killer feature is instant completion of torrents if someone else has already downloaded them. I can be watching a movie 60 seconds after thinking of it.

[steeve]

Then you might want to try XBMCtorrent [1]. (disclosure: I wrote it)

Select a torrent, watch it.

[1] http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQiC62ig3N0

Edit: wrong url

[possibilistic]

> I can be watching a movie 60 seconds after thinking of it.

Is that at all legal? Unless you mean films that have fallen into the public domain or that remain unlicensed in your nation or jurisdiction, I'm pretty sure this is unlawful. If there aren't laws on the books yet concerning a 3rd party service downloading or hosting pirated content on one's behalf yet, I would still consider this to be unethical behavior.

Does put.io intend to share the business tactics of MegaUpload? (ie. looking the other way concerning how many users will make use of the service?)

I don't mean to sound belligerent. I feel this is an angle that would be good to discuss.

[steelaz]

A lot of people mention ability to almost instantly stream the movie you want, but you can already do that using torrents. It's called sequential downloading. After buffering a few % of the whole torrent, you can start watching it with VLC (not sure if other players support it).

[gramsey]

I will also heartily voice my love of this service. It has totally changed the way I view movies and TV shows.

I'm a technically-inclined person, but I really don't want to spend hours fiddling with torrents. The instant torrent completion is an absolutely killer feature. The UI is easy to use and dead simple. The developers regularly update the site and let us know when there are disruptions.

I'm a "broke" college student, and to be honest, out of all of the online services I pay money for, this is the one I think the least about before purchasing.

[kang]

movies.io integrates great with put.io. Watch a trailer, click, watch the movie!

[TallGuyShort]

It seems as though the primary use case being discussed and implied is torrenting of media that is not legal (however ethical you feel it may be) to torrent in many countries. Please remember that when you do so, you weaken the case the rest of us have against the same laws you're ignoring, against DRM, against intrusions into our privacy, and against unfair ISP practices.

[fauigerzigerk]

So there are two groups of people on this planet:

(a) Those who download stuff illegally instead of paying like 0.01% of their disposable income per year for it whilst making about as much money as those who have created the content.

(b) Those who download stuff illegally instead of having no access at all or paying completely unaffordable fantasy prices for it whilst making only a fraction of those who have created the content.

In which group you fall depends mostly on where you were born. And this is not primarily a debate about inequality as much as it is about infrastructure. There simply is no Netflix in most parts of the world that gives you reliable access to a huge movie library for peanuts.

So when you say "you weaken the case the rest of us" you should be aware of how "you" and "us" can mean very different things depending on who says that to whom.

[belorn]

Not respecting copyright in 2014 is a moral issue.

It is good when authors can earn money on their work, and thus it used to be that authors had a deal with the government. Tax money is spent to enforce a limited monopoly for a few years, and afterward society could the work to the improvement of all. This deal has now been completely perverted, and all works stays perpetually under restrictions.

Worse, In Sweden, we have a special deal on top of copyright. Every time someone purchase a harddrive, they are forced (through taxes) to pay for the privilege of "private copying". This deal is then again perverted through the use of DRM. Companies that do this are effectively stealing, and here the word is used correctly: They are stealing my money. I paid for something, and the other party is now refusing to give up their side of the bargain.

When asked to respect copyright, I am asked to balance the moral issues at hand. Can I, morally, support the perversion in order to get authors some money, or should I ignore copyright in order to force a change.

[merry-year]

Just the opposite - every time you buy any content from the evil media mega corps you're funding their war against privacy, democracy and individual freedoms.

[hhw]

Megaupload had more legal use cases than this. They will have to stay under the radar, or else be busted by the feds like so many other torrent related sites. Kind of hard to do, when you'll inevitably end up with people torrenting using public trackers. Most people on private trackers have already figured out seedboxes, so if they do restrict to private trackers, they won't have much of a market. And if and not when they get raided, there will be plenty of incriminating evidence against their client base.

[mayneack]

I'm pretty sure the legality depends on WHAT you're torrenting. Is it illegal to torrent ubuntu anywhere?

[Nursie]

I understand the ethically shady bit but... how does it weaken the case against DRM? Surely it just continues to demonstrate how useless it is as a strategy?

[pikachu_is_cool]

It honestly is not an issue, in my opinion. put.io just seems like a low-cost seedbox. https://whatbox.ca/ has existed for eons and is primarily used to pirate music and it hasn't been shut down.

[SimpleXYZ]

I think the real case should be against anti-piracy. The music and movie industries punish people because they don't like their business model or their product. Copyright laws were created when books were the medium. This is the fundamental key: I can not create 300,000 physical books with three mouse gestures.

Think about how common piracy is. They demand what? 250k for each song downloaded. Multiplied by the number of songs downloaded illegally per day... they feel they are entitled to 600 trillion dollars per year. Does that sound right to you?

Piracy is our new eighteenth amendment.

[warrenmiller]

Anyone else worried a list of all your torrens is kept in one place and can be tied directly back to you via you Credit card, unless you pay via bitcoins. They might not do anything with this data but when pressed by Mr big Coporation they may have no choice...

[genu1]

I am. Anyone know details about the founders? Are these guys trying to make a statement, or out to make a buck? In which case, selling the data about its users would be a great monetization model.

[melloclello]

Thrice today I've clicked on a link to put.io (which was upvoted on a number of sites), scrolled around absentmindedly for a bit, and left. It was only just now that I thought, 'wait a second' and clicked back, to realise that your site is a bittorrent service (and one that I may actually use since my free EC2 instance (which I was using as a torrent box) just expired).

I guess what I'm saying is, you might want to unbold 'Hassle-free' and embolden the word 'torrenting' in your byline. Or something like that. Here's what my brain saw when I went to your site:

http://i.imgur.com/9D78Bx9.png

I'm not being snarky, but I am trying to help you see into the mind of a disinterested internet user in the midst of a mild social media daze.

[msoad]

These are the reasons put.io is awesome:

    - It caches torrents that other people downloaded(popular torrents) so if you add them, they are in your library immediately
    - You can subscribe to RSS feeds of TV shows from showrss.info without needing to download every show individually 
    - You can install the XBMC app to access you content there
    - A REST API? Yup! They have it!
    - It converts videos to MP4 on their cloud 
    - You can use multi-connection downloaders to reach to speeds like 30Mbps
    - There are many apps to use with put.io

[mikevm]

You forgot the best reason:

   - It links all your downloaded content directly to your credit card, thus incriminating you.

[adrinavarro]

Hey! Someone uses showRSS! Glad you like it :D

[uladzislau]

I was using it for some time until they started to use all kind of tricks to force me to upgrade to the more expensive plans. It started from $5, then I was paying $10 and after the next "upgrade or we remove your account", I cancelled.

[mindcrash]

Interesting proposition, but:

"Our servers are in Netherlands"

Are they insane? If there's any country hostile to these kinds of services it's the Netherlands. The copyright outfit BREIN is taking down Usenet providers (if they can proof they are willingly providing access to pirated material), Usenet communities and Torrent communities housed in the Netherlands left and right; I can't imagine they would leave something screaming that it basically is intended for violating copyright and with rising popularity like put.io alone for long.

[baddox]

This seems like a slightly worse seedbox marketed towards people who haven't heard of seedboxes.

[EGreg]

What we could use is a secure cloud like freenet, which:

1) Converts and transcodes files on the client

2) Encrypts them on the client, has diffs and versioning with git

3) Stores encrypted versions in a distributed manner on many servers

4) Uses bitcoins to pay for all the bandwidth, storage

5) Is an autonomous corporation that can't be shut down

blabla

Maybe in a few years this will exist.

[taternuts]

I'm a fan of http://www.feralhosting.com myself. I know http://www.whatbox.ca can do similar stuff via an nginx config

[lowglow]

From the FAQ (http://faq.put.io/):

> Why are downloads from put.io to my computer slow?

> Well the biggest factor is your location. Our servers are in Netherlands.

-

I guess this is why I torrent. :(

[nostromo]

I imagine hosting this service in the US would create all sorts of liabilities.

[jamesaguilar]

Gets 5 MB/s to me in CA.

[rizalp]

You can change the where the servers for your downloaded content is. Just take a look at the settings.

I live in southeast Asia, and there's even Singapore listed on it. So it's very helpful to speed up the download

[pekk]

I see this as a mechanism for diffusing liability. Users who would otherwise be legally liable for seeding copyrighted content can instead use put.io, which "seeds" for them without their involvement and just lets them download as if they were only leeching.

As long as nobody gets a legal beatdown for using put.io...

[Meekro]

This is a really cool idea, but I'd like a bit more storage, and less cost, before I sign up. If I could get 3TB for $15/mo, I'd be there. 3TB drives can be had for $120, and I'd like my cloud storage to be competitively priced.

Offloading my torrent collection into the cloud sounds like a great step forward, but not if it results in me paying more.

[paulbaumgart]

Amazon's S3, which presumably has scale advantages over put.io, charges $80/TB/month just for storage. put.io charges only 60% of that with data transfer included. Based on that, I doubt your wishes will come true any time soon.

[lispsil]

Somebody tell these guys to use mandatory encryption with all their staff internal communications. Would have saved Megaupload a lot of hassle

[kayoone]

I really dont get this. The use case must be to download copyright protected stuff, otherwise no one would pay for this, but isnt it pretty dangerous to hand all your download history and stuff like that to a 3rd party ? That opposed to an unlimited Usenet Subscription for $10/mo with SSL encryption and no user traceable data.

[gkoberger]

This has been around for a few years. It's absolutely amazing -- you can subscribe to RSS, and it makes it dead simple to stream to Roku/etc, too.

[dmix]

How do you stream to Roku? (I just got mine, I'm new)

[duochrome]

You never heard of Xunlei? It's a Chinese product and it's like just $20 a year.

Xunlei has a huge network and it's very likely the content you want is already in their server and has been encoded.

[yueq]

Glad someone mentioned this company. Their services are banned outside China mainland cause of copyright concerns.

[fmax30]

How is it different from http://boxopus.com/ , boxopus at least has a free tier , put.io doesn't.

[aluhut]

Doesn't anymore. They had one then closed it down saying that: "it didn't work out for them". I guess it was good enough when they were new.

I'm curious how they made it on top of HN today. They are not new, the concept is not new. Nothing is really innovative about it. Still they are topic No. 1 today.

[n1ghtmare_]

Well it looks like a cool service, not sure how to sign up though ? I don't have a facebook account and there is a link to use email instead that doesn't seem to work.

[mayneack]

How does this save bandwidth? Let's say I want to watch a 4gb 720p movie? If I use this, won't I just then be streaming that much data or losing quality? Torrenting generally is better for slow connections than streaming because you can torrent and then play offline instead of having to worry about buffering and a consistent connection.

[craigmccaskill]

It saves bandwidth because a lot of ISPs track upload and download towards your bandwidth limit. This removes the upload component completely.

[zmk_]

I thinke they meant that they are caching caching stuff on the backend so the downloads "finish" faster if they are other people on the service downloading the same files.

[Nursie]

No uploading or torrent protocol overhead?

[RealGeek]

I was disappointed by Put.io in the past, it over promised and under delivered. It seemed like an unstable app with very slow speeds. It looks like they have improved since I last used it, I will give it another try.

I use http://www.cloudload.com, it is a similar app and works like a charm.

[adrinavarro]

I used them before and I'm trying them again. They now seem to allow you to pick the best mirror available for you, so your ISP's peering is no longer a problem.