14 DAY TRIAL // Kickass Torrents, the world's biggest torrent index, has added support for on-site video streaming, following in The Pirate Bay's footsteps.
We wrote yesterday about how The Pirate Bay's management decided to take a gamble on a new technology called Torrents Time, which allows users to view P2P-shared video content inside their browser with the help of a special browser add-on.
Without wasting too much time, Kickass Torrents (KAT) admins also implemented video streaming on their site but didn't just go for one solution, opting to use two different technologies, one from Torrents Time and the other from a new app called Playback Media Player.
Unlike The Pirate Bay, where users only needed to push a button, things on KAT are quite complicated.
The two streaming buttons are confusing, and the one that looks like a native button is actually an ad that leads to a project that appeared out of nowhere while the legitimate streaming Torrents Time technology displays where ads usually appeared in the past and doesn't always show up on the site.
The stream buttons don't show all the time. Here's how to get them!
But we need a little bit of context before going on. Kickass Torrents shows a lot of ads, which users noticed and complained about. That's why, if users register an account, they see fewer advertisements.
If you visit KAT today, without logging in or without an ad blocker, you'll see both streaming options, as in the image below.
If you have an ad blocker installed, both options disappear, regardless of whether you're logged in or not.
If you disable your ad blocker but you're logged in, only the Playback Media Player option appears, even if it's an obvious ad, and the Torrents Time option disappears, even if it's based on trial-tested and open source project that gives it more legitimacy.
This is very sneaky on KAT's side, but enough, at least theoretically, to allow its admins to brag about being the largest video streaming site on the Internet, a title claimed in the past days by The Pirate Bay team.
What's now left is to find out more details about this new Playback Media Player, which claims on its website that it is based on the Playback open source project, but fails to offer any links to its source code, as Torrents Time does with its GitHub repository.
