EZTV

EZTV was a TV torrent distribution group founded in May 2005 and dissolved in April 2015, after a hostile takeover of their domains and brand by "EZCLOUD LIMITED".

History

Founding

It was originally founded in response to the forced disappearance of TVTorrents.tv and btefnet via lawsuit. The group was founded by a loose coalition of volunteers and holds no formal ties to its predecessors.

In the aftermath of the takedown of TVTorrents and btefnet, the BitTorrent community felt a need for a site that moderated its content. The two groups were known to never provide any fake links, a problem that used to be quite prevalent on public bittorrent sites prior to improvements in community-powered filtering in recent years. A group of volunteers gathered in the IRC channel #EZTV on the EFnet IRC network to create a TV torrent group from scratch in order to fill this void in the public bittorrent scene.

The idea behind EZTV was to create a group that would pick up where its two predecessors left off while avoiding what they considered the "weak spots" that had brought them down. This meant that EZTV should never host its own torrent files, its leadership structure should be dynamic and opaque to avoid presenting any obvious target for litigation, and the group should not host or run its own tracker.

EZTV (media company)

EZTV is a production company and exhibition venue founded in Los Angeles in 1979 by film scholar, writer and video producer John Dorr, along with several filmmakers, actors, writers, musicians and artists.

EZTV is credited with creating one of the world's first video theaters, computer art gallery and independent media center. Dorr wrote, produced and directed some of the earliest feature-length narrative films on video, and through his advocacy and example, helped spawn the current independent media revolution, seen most typically today, online, through services such as YouTube.

Early history

After a series of public screenings of early EZTV videos at the West Hollywood Community Center, Dorr, with a group of EZTV co-founders that included Michael Masucci, Strawn Bovee, Mark Shepard, James Williams, Pat Miller, created in 1982 "EZTV Video Gallery", a 40-seat video theater, art gallery and media lab. The gallery's first premiere video was Dorr's Dorothy and Alan at Norma Place, making the gallery an instantaneous success, due in part to an article in the American Film Institute's American Film magazine, as well as in various local print and electronic press. Within two years, media attention had reached a national scale, and EZTV expanded to a 100-seat video theater, with two gallery spaces, a production studio, five video editing rooms, a music lab and a photography darkroom. EZTV continued to receive routine local press attention, through newspapers such as the LA Times, the LA Weekly, and the LA Reader, as well as various magazine, TV and radio coverage.