
Put.io - tlongren
http://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.

~~~
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.

~~~
gambiting
Depends where you are in the world. In my country(Poland) downloading any
material for your own use is 100% legal.

~~~
somesay
Though BitTorrent always includes uploading, too. That's the really risky
part.

------
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.

~~~
ceol
Let's not delude ourselves into thinking the people who are in group (b) are
the ones who have enough money to afford a high-bandwidth internet connection,
a modern computer, and the knowledge to know what torrents and the
accompanying technology are.

The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel
like paying for. There might be a handful who genuinely can't access it, who
have no way to legally pay for it outside of handing over a substantial amount
of their small wealth, and they paradoxically also have access to an internet
connection strong enough and a computer powerful enough that can handle
streaming these movies. However, they do not represent the vast, vast, vast
majority of users.

~~~
fridek
In my part of the world (Eastern Europe) 25 mbps no-quota costs about $20/mo
(~2% avg income) in the urban areas. Outside of cities the price stays the
same but usually only (A)DSL is available, with bandwidth ranging from 512kbps
to ~15mbps.

Accidentally, an average price of a DVD movie is also around $20. So yes,
there are places where fast internet is affordable, yet movies are not. Unless
you want to watch only one per month and give up your internet instead.

There is also a matter of TV series, which you have to wait 1-2 years for
(poorly dubbed) in TV or on DVD.

Of course we are probably in something like the top 10% of wealthy places to
live in. I can only imagine that situation in poorer countries resembles the
one we had when internet was just kicking off and hardly anyone had
connection. There was (illegal) business model of downloading movies (from
Kazaa or weird warez forums), burning them on CDs and selling for the locally
acceptable price.

Guess what - unless the price of virtual goods is adjusted to the local
standards, and the availability increases, piracy will be there.

~~~
ceol
If a $20 DVD isn't affordable, $20/mo internet isn't. (I'm also fairly
skeptical that your average DVD movie is $20, as though that's the absolute
lowest you'll ever pay.) Movies aren't a God-given right, so it's not like you
deserve a set amount of movies per month.

Even then, while that situation is certainly more excusable, _you 're still
the minority_. That site isn't made for the Eastern European lower class who
can't afford to buy a DVD. It's made for folks who have the money (which means
they can purchase and maintain a computer as well as a monthly internet
connection) but who don't feel like spending it.

Plus, I'm fairly sure iTunes has movie rentals in most Eastern European
countries.[0]

[0]: [http://support.apple.com/kb/ts3599](http://support.apple.com/kb/ts3599)

~~~
parandroid
I have a cheap internet connection (16Mbit, ~$13/month), and I'm not a
minority. In my country, having an internet connection that's speedy enough
for video streaming is not a luxury. And yet, I can't even buy anything off
iTunes, Google Play Store, not to mention Netflix and other similar services.
In fact, we even got PayPal only in mid 2013 (and not even the full service -
we can only send money and can't receive anything), that's how "open" the
internet is to our market.

Also, my country is in southern Europe, not part of the EU yet.

> The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't
> feel like paying for.

I think this is highly biased towards your own ideas of how someone could use
such service. You are, in fact, projecting[0] your own probable scenarios to
large group of people you have never met, living in countries you've only
heard of in the news. That, sir, is unfair. You should not stick with
generalized opinions and prejudice, mkay?

[0]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection)

~~~
dfc
Is there a discipline that starts footnotes at 0?

~~~
soperj
Computer Science. Everything starts with 0.

~~~
dfc
What journals use this style of footnote formatting?

------
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.

~~~
gcb0
Like it matters...

It could have been founded my mother Theresa. It would still be a sweet place
for the MAFIAA tugs to drop DMCA requests, or whatever those abuses are called
nowadays, by the truckload on their heads.

~~~
sillysaurus2
_It would still be a sweet place for the MAFIAA tugs to drop DMCA requests, or
whatever those abuses are called nowadays_

How are DMCA requests inherently abuses?

~~~
pritambaral
Because DMCA makes itself easy to be abused. Off the top of my head, I can
remember Microsoft asking Google to take down results to OpenOffice[1]. The
first Google result for "DMCA Abuse" reveals this:[2]

[1]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/16/microsoft_dmca_taked...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/16/microsoft_dmca_takedown_requests_targeting_openoffice/)

[2] [https://www.eff.org/press/releases/fifteen-years-dmca-
abuse](https://www.eff.org/press/releases/fifteen-years-dmca-abuse)

EDIT: They aren't "inherently" abuses. They are easily used as such.

------
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](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

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

~~~
larrybolt
I loved it! And still do, but sadly I moved to a
RPi/XBMC/transmission/SickBeard/Couchpotato setup which was very easy to setup
using xbian, thus not using showRSS anymore. The raspberry is a bit
underpowered (according to me) though, so I'm thinking about replacing
SickBeard with showRSS again. Pitty there isn't a good & easy way to do it.
(not that I'm afraid of doing it all manually).

Perhaps also interesting, before using showRSS I was using TVshowsApp
([http://tvshowsapp.com/](http://tvshowsapp.com/)).

Something I'm missing from showRSS btw, is the ability to browse trough all
episodes/seasons and be able to select an episode/season to be added to the
RSS-queue, so my downloading box would fetch it next time it checks the feed.
But than, showRSS does one thing very well, so I'm not sure more features like
that would be helpful for everyone.

~~~
adrinavarro
ShowRSS right now works as a piece in the workflow for many people: feed what
aired a few hours ago to another system. It hasn't got an archive and it
doesn't serve as one. Thus, no option to do what you say… it's meant for the
last week or so, not a lot more.

It does what it does pretty well, though. The new system reads a few sources
(not just EZTV) and picks the best releases. So, 720p for everyone in a matter
of hours and for almost every show you can think of.

P.S: have you thought about using transmission+dyndns? It's how I run it
(minidlna+transmission, and showRSS pushes to my rasppi, no RSS involved!).

~~~
larrybolt
I agree, it does what it does very very well! And it's not meant as a show-
organizer.

minidlna seems like something I'm going to be looking into, thanks! And for
dns, I use a domain which I manage using cloudflare and a script [1] which
gets run by cron and updates the cloudflare entry every day or so. Didn't
wrote the script though, found it somewhere and had to edit it a bit to work
again.

Something else I have been looking into is splitting up the load, using the
RPi only for streaming and xbmc; and handling downloading and NAS capabilities
using a different device, such as a MIKROTIK RouterBOARD (which I'm afraid
isn't going to work).

[1]:
[https://gist.github.com/larrybolt/6295160](https://gist.github.com/larrybolt/6295160)

------
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.

~~~
silvertab
Wow, a bit surprised to hear that! What kind of tricks are we talking about?
I've been on their $5 plan for over a year and have never heard anything from
them about upgrading!

~~~
lelandbatey
How do you have a $5 plan? I don't see it listed anywhere on the pricing page:
[http://puu.sh/6Jlp8.png](http://puu.sh/6Jlp8.png)

~~~
silvertab
Interesting, they used to offer a 10GB plan for $5 (which I've always been on:
[http://d.pr/i/WDEK](http://d.pr/i/WDEK) ) . Apparently it's not available
anymore! However, I was never asked to upgrade my plan (I didn't even know the
plan I was on didn't exist anymore before today!)

~~~
ondrae
I've also been on the five dollar plan for over a year. Also, never been asked
to upgrade.

~~~
fit2rule
They only ask you to upgrade if they determine you've been using put.io for
porn, and nothing but porn.

------
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.

~~~
larrybolt
Unless they use cyberbunker
([http://www.cyberbunker.com/](http://www.cyberbunker.com/)), but I doubt it.

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

~~~
kennywinker
Or for people who aren't interested in managing their own box, building /
installing / maintaining the control software, etc.

Just the same way Dropbox is for people who haven't heard of NASs or Amazon
S3.

~~~
baddox
There are seedbox providers which require _very_ little knowledge or effort.

~~~
diminoten
Took me 3 minutes to get put.io working.

Name one seedbox provider that can be set up that quickly.

~~~
sergiotapia
I'm an IT RETARD - I have no shame about that. At best I know about sudo apt-
get install - but seedbox configurations on most providers is click next next
next.

They even have 1 click installers, it's really simple.

~~~
diminoten
That's very true, but I'm always apprehensive about stuff like that, given how
dangerous a default config can be to my wallet. Specifically, if bandwidth
isn't properly capped, or metered, I'd be shelling out more money than I'm
saving by (hypothetically - calm down RIAA) pirating content!

------
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.

~~~
huhtenberg
1-3 was done by Wuala and if their history is of any indication, this is an
unsustainable model even without added complexity of being fully
decentralized, bitcoin-supported community project.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala)

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

------
lowglow
From the FAQ ([http://faq.put.io/](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.

~~~
rmc
Yeah cause there's _no_ copyright law in the Netherlands

------
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...

~~~
judk
Diffusing, or centralizing at put.io? (How are they not shut down yet?) And
the law takes a dim view of conspiracy as well...

------
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.

~~~
jonknee
S3 is one of the most expensive ways to store and transfer stuff though. Not
to say the original poster could find that pricing, but if S3 is your
benchmark you can save a _lot_ of money.

~~~
foobarqux
Can you name some good alternatives?

~~~
Meekro
DreamHost's DreamObjects is pretty interesting -- it's much cheaper, and
implements the S3 protocol so it's (mostly) a drop-in replacement.

------
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)

~~~
calebrown
Put.io has an official Roku app (it works great!) -
[https://twitter.com/putdotio/status/423135044371505152](https://twitter.com/putdotio/status/423135044371505152)

------
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/](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.

------
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.

------
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](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.

------
stigi
I don't want to be offensive, but what's the news in this post? Why is it no 1
on HN right now?

------
scrrr
If you're downloading copyrighted movies, it seems to be a slightly silly idea
to supply anyone with a list. And your payment information.

------
lucb1e
Wait, I don't get it. This is basically the same as running a server with a
torrent daemon (like Transmission) on it, except you pay them instead of get
your own server?

Also their arguments are somewhat invalid:

> People sharing your internet connection. They hate you! With put.io, you
> won't disturb them, because you won't be hogging all the bandwidth.

It doesn't matter whether I download 18GB from http(s) or from a torrent, the
data remains the same size, except you can usually limit the torrent traffic
whereas most people wouldn't know how to limit http(s) traffic in their
browser.

> Watch RSS feeds

My torrent server does that too, but I never use it anyway

> Huge torrents are hard to get

Why?

> Get to your files from anywhere

Okay this is the only advantage if you don't have your own server.

~~~
babby
>It doesn't matter whether I download 18GB from http(s) or from a torrent, the
data remains the same size

Incorrect. For starters, torrent overhead is much higher than http traffic and
so the transfer is actually cheaper for http. More critically is the fact that
high connection count, as associated with torrents, results in connection
saturation on 90% of consumer routers thus crippling all traffic, especially
sensitive stuff like gaming, for everyone involved.

Other than that yeah, but this isn't for people like us. This is actually
perfect for people like my father; he comes around every week to grab TV and
Movies off me. I could remotely manage his account until he figured it out
himself.

The thing that could make this service much better would be a feature to LAN
sync content, so that one doesn't need to pull down from the internet when the
file is avaliable over the LAN. Kind of like how Dropbox-esque services do it.

------
Orangeair
So as far as I understand, this service basically just equates to a way to
download torrents faster. Sometimes much faster, but still, that doesn't seem
super important. Also, can someone explain to me what kind of torrents people
would actually use this for? They seem to have a huge emphasis on videos, but
they also say that they don't allow copyrighted content. Maybe I just don't
know much about torrents (I mostly use them for things like downloading
Ubuntu), but I don't understand what kind of legal videos people would be
torrenting so frequently that they need this.

~~~
zmk_
They don't even pretend outside of TOS. On the main page in the examples there
is copyrighted material.

Also, how is paying somebody to brake the law for you not breaking the law as
well? Out of all the ways to get "videos" of the Internet this must be the
least secure nowadays.

------
notfed
"With put.io...you won't be hogging all the bandwidth." \- How could this
possibly save bandwidth?

~~~
neurostimulant
Many people use ISP-provided router that choked when there are a lot of open
connections. A torrent client will usually try to open as many connections as
possible, pushing the router to the limit. Under that condition, if another
user join the network and tried to browse the internet, he'll encounter a lot
of connection timeout error. The only way to avoid this issue is to configure
the torrent client to play nice (limit the number of connections) or tweak the
router QoS settings to lower priority for torrents traffic (not sure if it's
possible with encrypted torrents).

source: my apartment shares a single dsl router to all its tenants

~~~
IE5point5
Just set a number of connections in your client that the router can handle.
Problem solved.

------
steeve
For those of you using XBMC, you might want to check out XBMCtorrent then [1].
It does exactly what the name says, while not depending on a service to do the
download: select a torrent, watch it.

Disclosure: I'm the author

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

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

EDIT: URL was wrong

------
Kiro
Isn't this just another seedbox or how is it different?

------
scrabble
It seems that the company would have a higher level of plausible deniability
of their screenshots didn't display torrents of material under copyright.

~~~
chippy
The materials are released under CC licences.

------
ferongr
>Huge torrents are hard to get

I'm not sure about this claim. From personal experience using ADSL, a 3G USB
stick, my uni's 100Mbps connection back in the day and lowly 128k ISDN, I'd
say that a torrent can either saturate one's connection with a healthy swarm
or be slow as molasses due to the lack of seeds. I'm not sure how a seedbox
can bypass the inherent mode of operation of the Bittorent protocol.

~~~
hhw
Simple, seedboxes tend to be close to other seedboxes. They then potentially
talk to each other over the same network, or a nearby one they peer with,
meaning bits generally have less distance to travel and over bigger pipes. A
disproportionately large number of seedboxes are hosted on OVH's network.

The capacity from the seedboxes back to you might not be that great, but it
doesn't matter because your home connection is so slow in comparison that it
can still easily be saturated.

------
djtriptych
There's just no way in hell I would ever use this without VERY good assurances
that my credit card will never be linked to what I download. There's about a
billion ways that could happen, EVEN IF put.io has no intention of ever
releasing that information.

Are they sure they won't be hacked? why?

Are they sure they wouldn't have to give up my information based on a public,
lawful gov't inquiry?

What about a secret, unlawful inquiry? Are they sure about that case?

How they can launch this with ZERO information about steps they've taken to
protect anonymity is mind-boggling to me. I'm about to send out a note to my
less technical friends to avoid this like the plague.

~~~
voxic11
Why not use bitcoin then?

------
gfalcao
I've been using put.io for 3 or 4 years now, it truly hassle free and I
literally can not understand why it wasn't featured in HN before.

I have upgraded and downgraded my plan many times, depending on my own needs,
it's been years I don't use a torrent client.

This is how you download torrents blazingly fast:

Download firefox + DownThemAll! extension, configure downthemall enabling all
the maximum of speeds

go to [http://put.io](http://put.io), add a torrent in the download queue, it
will probably be done within minutes, if not seconds (no exaggeration), then
download them straight to your computer through downthemall

------
tbarbugli
To me it sounds very scary to make profit with something related to torrents.
If I was the founder of put.io I would spend most of the time looking at the
window expecting an FBI helicopter to land on my garden at any time.

------
posborne
I wrote this ([https://github.com/posborne/putio-
sync](https://github.com/posborne/putio-sync)) a few weekends ago for
automatically grabbing content from put.io using their API
([https://put.io/v2/docs/index.html](https://put.io/v2/docs/index.html)).
Pretty handy and performs downloads quickly by doing multi-segment downloads.
Pure python and MIT licensed -- should be pip installable from pypi.

I string this together with another script to rename content and it drops
right into my Plex library.

------
inanov
When you have some slow peers along with a lousy internet connection, put.io
really helps. with my upload speeds (makes 56K jealous), to seed a torrent up
to a meaningful ratio, i should wait forever. put.io helps me with this and
many other stuff. besides that, they recently added a server to my city, which
boosted my usage.

Besides the torrents, they catch rss feeds, podcasts faster than I do, and I
just stream it, if I need any subtitles, I just upload them (or fetch from
open subtitles) and there they are.

I love their service and will keep supporting them, and recommend to anyone I
know.

------
rsoto
I was a costumer, before focusing entirely on torrents, they also provided
downloads for Rapidshare-like-sites, where you could download one file every
two or three hours, which was pretty inconvenient. Put.io had a few premium
accounts, so they downloaded that for you.

I guess then the premium accounts were suspended as it was hurting
Rapidshare's sales and Put.io stopped offering that service.

Put.io is awesome, it's a very good and very well executed idea, but it was
even more awesome a few years ago, and less expensive.

------
xerophtye
Umm... maybe i am misunderstanding their service, but i fail to see the point.
With put.io, a server can torrent the file for me. And then... i stream it
from the server... So, my pc still needs that gigabits of transfer, at my
usual net speed. Where was the gain? Couldn't i have used the same time to
torrent it? In fact i would have to torrent it ONCE, but with put.io i have to
stream (and thus effectively download that data) each time i want to view that
file...

~~~
cloudwalking

      - You don't need to seed.
      - Your ISP won't throttle your torrent packets.

~~~
foobarqux
You can also stream immediately without waiting for the torrent to complete.

~~~
lispsil
You also avoid nasty letters from copyright lawyers, which can get you kicked
off campus at some universities or even kicked out of school sadly. Of course
a vpn also avoids this, or a seedbox, or newsgroups

------
voltagex_
Those seeding rules will get you banned off quite a few trackers.

------
martincerdeira
The name "putio" sucks. It's sounds like the spanish word "puto" (that means
faggot) I think the service is great, though

~~~
rburhum
I saw the HN post 6 times today and every single time I read puto. Not trying
to troll, just being honest about the name.

------
ukd1
Sounds similar to [https://www.streem.com/](https://www.streem.com/) but with
less focus on video?

------
x0054
For $15 a year you can get a crappy little VPS with 20 gigs of disk and
200GB/month connection. Install transmission on it and use it as a seed box.
On popular torrents you can get 4-7mbps transfer speeds. Have the files saved
once done to a folder that you share via BT Sync, and the files will
automatically move to your computer once done. Just another solution.

~~~
tr4656
Might as well pay a bit more and get a seedbox. Most VPS won't all you to
torrent in their TOS.

~~~
x0054
Though true, most low end providers never check or care.

------
forty2
So far guys I'm using StreamNation.com
([http://www.streamnation.com](http://www.streamnation.com)), way better than
put.io, their UI is amazing, they offer way more features and their iOS app is
a killer with an offline mode. Last the pricing: they are 10 times less
expensive. You should try my friends!

~~~
forty2
Plus they transcode all videos so you can stream to any device. 20GB of free
storage and support for magnets.

------
woodylondon
My concern with this is that they will have your credit card details / address
information. At a later stage should they have a big legal problem (which I
suspect they will) the lawyers will come directly after you. It's a great
idea, and if it was for legal use only, but you know what people are really
going to use it for!

------
esMazer
what are they going to do when people download illegal torrents to it?

~~~
tlongren
[https://put.io/dmca](https://put.io/dmca)

~~~
notfed
So...it's sort of like the same as downloading torrents only you pay them
money and also there's people watching what you're downloading. Cool.

~~~
gdrulia
Not just any money, price plans are quite drastic ones.

------
sorpaas
If you live in China, you will find Xunlei(lixian.xunlei.com) and
Xuanfeng(lixian.qq.com) all have similar functions.

------
akumen
Hmm ... so the service looks to target what would be considered illegal in
most countries yet has no meaningful way to hide the user's identity? Using a
VPN will not help when subpoenas are coming down for release of CC/payment
details with names, billing address etc. Am I missing something?

------
badman_ting
But what if you want the stuff on your computer? I'm guessing you have to
download it from the cloud, so… I don't get the point? Help me out here.

Edit: Well, I guess you still get the benefit of them doing the seeding
instead of your home connection… That's more attractive to some than others I
suppose.

------
joris
I use [http://subliss.com](http://subliss.com) and it works pretty great for
videos. They offer free trials through this link:
[https://subliss.com/users/sign_up](https://subliss.com/users/sign_up)

~~~
zidad
That's my favorite torrent service to download & watch movies directly on ipad
(without requiring a NAS or media server to stream it)

------
jarnix
There are other websites for this usage, did anyone try the others sites
mentioned here : [http://www.noobstogeek.com/free-online-torrent-
downloader/](http://www.noobstogeek.com/free-online-torrent-downloader/)

?

------
avodonosov
All download data flows to put.io and don't take your bandwidth. But then you
download it via http - the same files. What's the point? You only save
bandwidth avoiding torrent seeding. Is it so significant to worry about it?

------
gerjomarty
Does anyone know how good the transcoding is on the stream? I torrent a lot of
x264 video with multiple complex ASS subtitles in the MKV container, so it'd
be nice if it handled those.

------
talonstriker
It'd be really cool if one of these websites integrated with Amazon S3 (i.e.
download it and store in one of my buckets). I don't need the storage, just
the bandwidth.

------
rpicard
I have been using put.io for years and I love them! Downloads from their
server to me are fast and the torrents themselves are often instant.

------
homakov
No word about security hah. I'd expect it <h1>! Will "NSA"/etc know what
torrents I downloaded?

~~~
homakov
bought membership. Hella fast! Thanks

~~~
dmak
West Coast!

------
jgreen10
I expect this is a very temporary service.

~~~
TheSmoke
it's been ~4 years since put.io opened its doors.

------
kkitay
Never heard of this before; paid the $0.99 and couldn't believe how awesome it
was. What a killer service.

------
qwwqww
seems like whatbox.ca offers a way better service. They got way more storage
for less money and they are fast as fuck. Only down thing is no instant
completion, but if you got enough seeders on your tracker, than every torrent
would be finished in less than 5 minutes

------
dmix
Does it support magnet links? This is an issue with remote servers hosting
rtorrent.

~~~
icebraining
Why would they have issues? rtorrent has supported magnet links for a long
time now.

------
warmwaffles
So...crappy seedboxes...no thank you. I'll just go with another provider.

~~~
recursive
What's crappy about this? It sounds pretty cool.

------
motyar
I have been using put.io, Its osm. [They closed all free accounts]

------
nly
bitfetch is a similar service, but requires no registration and uses bitcoin
for payment exclusively.

[https://bitfetch.com/](https://bitfetch.com/)

------
sturmeh
Please reconsider using an flipped beats logo (cringe).

------
progamler
already postet 1395 days ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255277)

------
pacifi30
The name in itself is so beautiful.

------
lurkinggrue
Wow, What a strange place to torrent:

[http://i.imgur.com/2S3YeYW.png](http://i.imgur.com/2S3YeYW.png)

------
Kiro
How can this be legal?

------
alooPotato
any chance I'll be able to stream to my chromecast?

~~~
roberto
There's an Android app that is announcing Chromecast support soon.

------
randomthought
how are the dealing with legal issues?

~~~
lurkinggrue
I think the answer is... They aren't.

------
ests
Wow. This is brilliant.

------
notastartup
This is great but how long until it gets shut down by RIAA or it's posse crew
members and the founder gets slapped with a huge fine? If anything they should
operate in a country where US does not have a good expedition treaty.

------
blahbl4hblahtoo
This is dumb. Using a service to pirate material? Jesus?

Another day another dumb dot eye oh...

------
PsychoBilly
I'd rather commit sepukku than paying a web-service that charges 10$/month to
seed for just 2 days until 2 ratio. I'll go with a cheap debian server + apt-
get install transmission-cli

~~~
PsychoBilly
... or a hidden raspberry stuffed near a hotspot

------
achalkley
Has this pivoted?

------
codecoda
am not going to use or support put.io - wtf, they want money..??!!

------
leoplct
Is not illegal downloading torrent?

