EZTV

» see eztv.ch as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Turkish television in the second half of the 2000s did not carry the American shows people were arguing about online, and TTNet had just gotten fast enough that this stopped being a reason to give up. Everyone I knew who watched those shows watched them as files with a very particular kind of filename.

EZTV made those filenames. It started in May 2005 as a release and distribution group for television, filling the hole left when TVTorrents.tv and btefnet went down, and for ten years it was where a new episode appeared first. The group was run by somebody who went by NovaKing. It took no money and carried no advertising, which in the torrent world of 2005 was already unusual.

It did not die of a lawsuit or a raid. It died because a group of scammers took the domain names one at a time, got into the founder's email through one of them, and then owned everything with his name on it. By April 2015 the original group had nothing left to run and said so in public.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the group actually did ~

The thing EZTV sold, without ever selling anything, was certainty. A torrent index is full of files claiming to be the episode you wanted, half of them mislabeled and some of them worse. The group handled the encode and the naming, and the naming was half the product: when the name said EZTV you could start the download and walk away from the machine.

That is why the takeover mattered more than a stolen domain normally would. Once somebody else was posting under the name, the only thing EZTV had ever offered was gone, and no amount of explaining on forums could put it back together.

~ how you steal a torrent site ~

The sequence is worth writing down because almost none of it involved breaking into anything. In January 2015 the Italian registry suspended eztv.it over inaccurate whois data, which is the kind of paperwork problem a site operating under an invented identity cannot fix. Weeks later the registry put the domain back on the market and somebody else bought it.

Then they registered a UK company called EZCLOUD LIMITED, the same company name EZTV itself used. With an invented director's name on that paperwork they claimed eztv.se through the registrar EuroDNS. NovaKing's mailbox lived on that domain, and with the mailbox came password resets for everything else. On 25 April 2015 the last domain fell. Four days later the remaining staff posted a warning telling people not to use the sites carrying their name.

~ the name is still up ~

A domain the takeover crew ended up with is still serving pages in 2026. It indexes television under the old branding, and it is not the same operation by any measure that matters. The other big torrent sites cut it off within weeks in 2015, and the people who had used the original spent years telling newcomers that the site they were on was a different thing wearing a dead group's name.

NovaKing did not come back. TorrentFreak reported in May 2015 that he had quit, and the reason given was not fear of prosecution. It had stopped being fun. Ten years of unpaid work ended over a whois field and a company registration form.

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