For several years, ETTV has been a household name in the torrent community.
The group, which distributes pirated TV-shows, originated at ExtraTorrent but when the site closed it built its own home.
Together with several like-minded uploaders, including ETHD, they launched ETTV.tv last fall. While the groups still distribute their work on other mainstream torrent indexes, the site’s traffic has been growing steadily.
That doesn’t mean that it’s been a smooth ride though. Like many other sites that offer pirated content, ETTV has been subject to various blocking efforts. Some ISPs in India are blocking the site, for example, and this week Australian providers were ordered to do the same.
To counter these efforts ETTV.tv has now launched its own proxy portal at ETTVproxies.com. The site currently lists one operational ‘alternative,’ but a site representative tells TF that other domains will follow.
“We’re going to launch more. This is just the beginning for us,” ETTV informs TorrentFreak.
“The goal here is to bypass these blocks they are trying to do. It’s not hard to evade their blocks at all, but for those that can’t be bothered ..we will have a bunch of domains which they can find us on.”
Generally speaking, ETTV is not overly concerned about the blocking efforts. While they are a nuisance, determined users have several options to circumvent them, even without a proxy site.
“We think the website blockades are useless. Some people are going to evade them using VPNs, some people using public DNS services such as Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8), and others are using Tor.”
ETTV is also planning to launch its own Tor version of the site, to make it more resilient. Also, it will keep its proxies out of popular search engines, hoping to stay under the radar as much as possible.
As we highlighted in the past, ETTV, ETHD, and similar groups don’t rip or encode any releases themselves. They’re pretty much automated scripts that take scene releases, and put these out in public.
There’s a broad audience for this content as their torrents are downloaded millions of times every week. This has also inspired some copycats to take away some of their traffic. But, ETTV is not too worried about those.
“They do not provide original content, and they will never gain popularity especially since people know who we are and where to find us, so they will eventually shut down,” ETTV tells us.
The biggest threat are the copyright holders, perhaps. Many torrent sites have come and gone over the past decade and a half, and several operators have paid a high price for stepping into this business.
Again, ETTV doesn’t seem to be too bothered about the ever-looming crackdown.
“Let’s see how much progress they will make by 2028. Last 15 years was a complete failure for them. The only people that got something out of this are the lawyers. Everybody else lost. Some more, some less,” ETTV concludes.
