A review of Movie ‘Streaming’ Websites, and why it works.

Websites that feature full-length movies shown as ’streaming’ video have taken great strides in becoming quite remarkable. Some even offer films & clips in High-Definition (HD). So how do they get away with it, you ask? Simple! They don’t host the movies – just the links to them. This lovable loophole even permits them to play the movies on their sites, while staying and inch or two out of the MPAA’s reach.

Very few ‘free’ online movie sites actually host the movies themselves – it requires an enormous amount of bandwidth, not to mention the legalities associated with hosting copyrighted content. The solution? They use inadvertent carriers such as youtube, megavideo, stage6, video.google, veoh.com etc. – all of which offer a staggering amount of video – but frown upon any copyrighted content submitted by their users. Uploaded content is heavily moderated – and promptly deleted – if and when something is found to be in direct violation of the sites’ policies on copyright infringement. Well, piracy is a wonderful weed – give it just a crack of sunlight and an iota of soil, and it will happily flourish. Movie piracy has found an opportunistic niche within the folds of the youtubes – almost the same way that pirates have inundated the 1-click file hosting sites with illegal content, as in the case of rapidshare and megaupload.com. The exact same ideology bodes true for youtube – copyrighted content gets uploaded; it becomes discovered and gets deleted; someone else re-uploads it under a different filename. It’s an infinite cat-and-mouse game in a world where there’s too many mice and not enough felines. Read more »