7 ms·
Fetch.io Downloads Your Torrents For You Insanely Fast, Then Streams Them to You
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- StavrosK 15y agoHow will these guys make money? This sounds insanely expensive.
- tomjen3 15y agoNot really, it is essentially rapidshare except they don't need to store as much data and they are backwards compatible with torrents. A pretty smart way to seed their service. FWIW Rapidshare is about $6/month.
- swombat 15y agoThe recording industry would be making $6/m more from at least one person if they offered this service directly themselves.
- miGlanz 15y agoI believe bittorrent traffic is subject to heavy deduplication. But what about legality?
- sovande 15y agoNot to mention that they navigate in a minefield of copyright and IP issues.
- wccrawford 15y agoThere's some numbers at the top that I -assume- are storage and transfer limits... But they aren't labeled, so I can't be sure. I'm also a little worried about the lack of privacy policy or TOS.
- martey 15y agoThe privacy policy and terms of service seem to be linked on the website: http://fetch.io/privacy/ http://fetch.io/privacy/ http://fetch.io/terms/ http://fetch.io/terms/ I think their DMCA policy seems interesting, as it seems to ask copyright holder to mail notice of infringement to their address in Hong Kong: http://fetch.io/dmca/ http://fetch.io/dmca/
- wccrawford 15y agoAh, I see. They disappear once you log in. My fault for signing up before I checked the terms.
- bshep 15y agoSounds like a great idea, but how liable are they for copyright infringement?
- scorpion032 15y agoIf you download a copyrighted file, it is your fault. Not of the tool you use for downloading it.
- user24 15y agoExactly. That's why guns and knives have no legal issues at all, nor strong cryptography or various questionable instruction manuals!
- corin_ 15y ago"guns and knives have no legal issues"..?
- corin_ 15y agoI guess people downvoting me somehow haven't heard gun control laws? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law There quite obviously ARE legal issues to do with owning guns and knives, not just the misuse of them. For example in England you can't even carry a knife around with you legally, with just a few exceptions.
- alvarosm 15y agoThey are downloading and redistributing pirated movies. They're basically helping piracy, and they're an easy target. They'll get shut down eventually if they don't die sooner on their own.
- rrrazdan 15y agoYup how is this different from the Lime Wire case. Basically I don't see how this will work. As an aside, except distros and open Documentaries, what all do people download legally through bit torrent?
- bambax 15y agoAm I missing something or is this the exact opposite of what torrenting is supposed to do? Torrents are decentralized so that there is no single bottleneck and no single point of attack. Re-centralizing torrents re-creates the problem torrents were supposed to solve...?
- mikle 15y agoI don't think they are doing it to support BitTorrent... It is just a service, not a replacement. I don't see why I'd prefer to use this , but I can see a situation where it can be easier to use than a bittorent client for novice users.
- probst 15y agoI have been using put.io for quite some time. Amongst other things they also provide the option to download torrent files and convert them into mp4, just like fetch.io. For me there are several benefits with using a service like this over downloading the file directly: * I can start a download, close my laptop and go to a different location or bring it to lecture or what not, and the download continues. * If my laptop is in for service I can download and stream a show on my iPad. * It is just extremely fast. Downloading a torrent to put.io and then streaming it is in my experience much faster than downloading the torrent directly to my computer. [edit: fixed formatting]
- deno 15y agoIt might be, but you're dismissing streaming the torrent directly. If your client can use moving window to select parts—instead of just doing it randomly—you could start watching your show without waiting for 100%. This does not require support in any client other than yours (however I'd imagine you would need at least some percentage of the swarm to use similar algorithm if you want to participate when the torrent is being only just seeded). Why this is not something commonly used, outside of specific commercial clients and to aid CDN networks, is a complete mystery to me.
- cleverjake 15y ago
- vog 15y agoWhile downloading, do they also upload to other clients? That is, do they only take from the Torrent network or are they giving back some bandwidth to the network?
- alvarosm 15y agoI guess not much, because they're heavily overloaded and they can't/won't spare the bandwidth. But that's not an issue, really, I guess they will eventually allow themselves to have a 1:1 up/down ratio at least, that should be nothing compared to the amount of clients they're serving.
- loki99 15y agoMost probably a honeypot of the RIAA. :P
- d0m 15y agoAlso, when lots of people will start to use it, it will be possible for them to cache files.. so you don't even have to wait for them to download the torrent.
- spindritf 15y agoThat's exactly what btaccel used to do — http://www.btaccel.com/ http://www.btaccel.com/ . They seem to be gone now though.
- madh 15y agoI think btaccel became Torrific (http://www.torrific.com http://www.torrific.com).
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoSo they're storing files on their servers and selling access to those files ... hope they have good copyright lawyers.
- erikabele 15y agoOh, maybe helpful to law enforcement since fetch.io will probably save your history of illegaly downloaded content...
- nphase 15y agoHow is this different than http://put.io http://put.io ?
- rb2k_ 15y agoput.io also supports "ftp’s, direct download links, many paysite links, basic http authenticated links" (http://put.io/features http://put.io/features). So I guess fetch.io has less features :)
- williegarvin 15y agoyeah, nothing new...
- helium 15y agoIt's free
- hafif 15y agothe free part will be totally useless. we've seen so many sites trying to do this for free. none of them work. imageshack closed it down, put.io didn't even try, torrific is so slow, you can write data faster by hand
- fsniper 15y agoFirst service doing this is http://put.io http://put.io . This seems to be a direct clone of put.io
- Siwy_ 15y agoHow would this compare to Newsgroups? Pretty much anything worthwhile that is on BitTorrent can be found on Newsgroup servers and leeched (or in case of videos streamed) at your connection’s maximum download speed. The only advantage I can think of is when ISPs block access to Newsgroups ~ am I missing something?
- kyleslattery 15y agoI think the idea is fetch.io will compress the video for you for streaming, so you don't need to download the full, uncompressed version.
- owenmarshall 15y agoThe first rule of Usenet: don't talk about Usenet. But seriously, a comparison: * This service appears to do a full download, unpackaging, and will even transcode. If you download binaries from Usenet, you've got to deal with sometimes incomplete NZBs, hunt down the PAR2 files that are never included in the download, ... * There is a free offering here. Decent binary Usenet service costs money. * Subjective: I always have a hard time finding good solid NZBs on Usenet -- this isn't bad because I can leech much faster, but it's still annoying to get a passworded download. >The only advantage I can think of is when ISPs block access to Newsgroups This isn't really a huge worry for most -- you don't use your ISPs news server, because the retention is terrible. If you are using Usenet for binaries, you are paying for a high-retention service. In the end I'd personally still prefer Usenet, because the average seedbox -- and let's be honest, that's all this is -- gets very slow, unreliable, and eventually dies under the weight of DMCA hits.
- ansy 15y agoDoes anyone know if fetch.io or put.io caches requests across accounts? It seems like a pretty obvious optimization, but neither services advertises this ability. Find appropriate torrent, it already exists on the server, start streaming immediately. With enough users it would be like a shady version of Netflix. At least until the MPAA catches on and floods them with DMCA requests.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- emp_ 15y agoSubtitles support planned? Uploading my own SRT and do some Subtler-like merge in the backend or picking one from the torrent files.
- codenerdz 15y agoThis does seem like a dangerous proposition if you dont want authorities to track your downloading habits from a single point of "privacy" failure P.S. I posted a direct link(didnt care to bring traffic to lifehacker) yesterday, but it never got any traction http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565861 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565861
- 7952 15y agoIt would be interesting to see what the IP of their BT client looks like. Maybe it would be possible to distribute the client across lots of machine and hide the fact that it was fetch.io. It would make it extremely difficult to actually prove that any infringement had occurred. Alternatively they could expose the IP of the end user in the headers and just claim to be a safe harbour.
- foob 15y agoI read through the terms, privacy policy, and dmca information because this site will obviously be used for piracy and where there's piracy there's lawsuits. It was kind of long so here's a tl;dr for anyone wondering about them. The terms prohibit using the service for any illegal purposes including copyright infringement. They then waive any liability for damages but also state that doing this is prohibited in some jurisdictions so this might not apply. Then finally under Indemnification they state that a user agrees to be monetarily responsible for any liabilities, claims, and expenses, including attorneys fees, that arise from misuse of the service. The privacy policy states that personal information will only be shared with the consent of the user or if required by law. The dmca page states that they will comply with requests but asks for them to be snail mailed to Hong Kong. I wonder if there are any jurisdiction issues with them being located in Hong Kong. Maybe this was a carefully chosen location for legal reasons; does anybody know anything about this? My other initial thought after reading this is that they're going to have a hard time tracking down the users responsible for submitting torrents in some cases. I can submit a torrent for a movie while at a coffee shop using a fake email address, post the link online somewhere, and then go home and watch it. Then the only crime that I've provably committed is downloading copyrighted material which is less of an offense then uploading. If the site were to get sued for uploading while downloading the torrent then they have nobody to pass that blame on to.
- prez 15y agoDoesn't seem very practical for torrents, but it looks like it works great for downloading rapidshare files - especially the annoying ones, divided into 20 x 100mb files.
- chaosfox 15y agoyou should take a look at jdownloader.org
- locusm 15y agoWont this be a one stop shop for the RIAA?
- cmars 15y agoNice, a liability lightning rod.