YIFY Movies & YTS,what happened?

YIFY movies came like a wrecking ball to Hollywood until its inevitable end in late 2015. For many years, FIFY was the number one source for movie piracy but all came to a halt when the owner was threatened with a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Today, we take a look at what happened to FIFY movies and their impact on internet piracy.

What Happened To YIFY Movies?

2010 marked a historical time for movie pirates, as flocks of pirate sites were popping up at a daily rate. Each site would borrow work from ‘Scene’, YIFY included. YIFY then went on to publishing trending movies to many big torrent sites. Overall, costing Hollywood millions.

Moving on, the group who made YIFY then went on to create YTS. This new site was their own torrenting site, where people could torrent popular movies in high quality. It didn’t take long for YTS to grow in size, eventually racking up thousands of torrents being downloaded daily.

Many years went past and the group had a following that a large corporation would be proud of. At their height, the website was accumulating millions of daily pageviews. Things were looking up for the torrent site, until they closed in 2015 that is.

The founder of YIFY supposedly located by various Hollywood sources. These sources then filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit and lead to the sites closure. The closure of the site was decided on in court. Since the lawsuit, the site has remained closed despite many other torrent sites taking its place.

After YIFY movies closed the founder made some public statements last year. He spoke about the sites beginnings and the rise and fall of YTS.

The Success Of Torrenting Sites

aXXo was the start of illegal movie streaming, he was the name given to a person who was infamous for cd-rips of popular movies. The rips of the movies were then uploaded to torrent sites where they would get downloaded and continue to circulate around the internet. Many people tried to strong-arm aXXo out of the torrent game but no one could deliver the quality that aXXo could. Despite his popularity, aXXo stopped activity in 2009 and lead the way for sites like PublicHD to continue in his footsteps. KickassTorrents and Pirate Bay then went on to elevate torrenting to new heights as they started to allow software files to be torrented.

After one year of YIFY Movies uploads they gained enough traction to launch their own movie streaming site. They named the site YTS, the site was operated from a house in Auckland, New Zealand. The founded said his aim was to “bring Hollywood films to the masses at smaller file-size.”

YTS succeeded where others failed by lowering the file size of their films, by using x264 video standard to encode their files. This allowed their films to be a fraction of the file size that competing websites were streaming at. When arguing his point that his intent was good, the founder said “users from all parts of the world, who have bandwidth or hard drive limitations, download and enjoy this content.”

Despite YIFY not releasing high quality torrents, they were still better than dvd rips of the films. Visitors to their site would criticise them on a daily basis on their poor picture quality. This lack of HD content was the result in mass file compression.

aXXo was the start of illegal movie streaming, he was the name given to a person who was infamous for cd-rips of popular movies. The rips of the movies were then uploaded to torrent sites where they would get downloaded and continue to circulate around the internet. Many people tried to strong-arm aXXo out of the torrent game but no one could deliver the quality that aXXo could. Despite his popularity, aXXo stopped activity in 2009 and lead the way for sites like PublicHD to continue in his footsteps. KickassTorrents and Pirate Bay then went on to elevate torrenting to new heights as they started to allow software files to be torrented.

After one year of YIFY Movies uploads they gained enough traction to launch their own movie streaming site. They named the site YTS, the site was operated from a house in Auckland, New Zealand. The founded said his aim was to “bring Hollywood films to the masses at smaller file-size.”

YTS succeeded where others failed by lowering the file size of their films, by using x264 video standard to encode their files. This allowed their films to be a fraction of the file size that competing websites were streaming at. When arguing his point that his intent was good, the founder said “users from all parts of the world, who have bandwidth or hard drive limitations, download and enjoy this content.”

Despite YIFY not releasing high quality torrents, they were still better than dvd rips of the films. Visitors to their site would criticise them on a daily basis on their poor picture quality. This lack of HD content was the result in mass file compression.

Torrent Sites After YIFY

Since YTS shut its doors, thousands of torrenting sites took its place. Although, one thing these new sites have in common is that if you look at their most popular movie torrents “YIFY” will be responsible for most of the torrent uploads. The Pirate Bay listed 72% of their Top 100 HD movies as YIFY Movies. Since 2012, 4,500+ pirated titles have been published on these illegal pirate sites. Before the websites were shut down new movies would appear every hour.

In 2017, internet piracy is comparable to a game of whack-a-mole where once one website shut, another takes its place. For hollywood this is bad news for obvious reasons. Although, torrent downloaders and people uploading alike wait patiently for more torrent sites to come forward.

In August of 2015, YTS had 3.4 unique monthly visitors and 43 million page views. This is a vast amount of views which resulted in big bucks being lost in dvd sales and cinema tickets. TorrentFreak hinted that the accused founder of YTS could be “working on an agreement to minimize their harm, possibly in exchange for information”. Although, the founder of YIFY Movies never actually gave his response on the settlement, because he probably wasn’t allowed to.

The Future Of It

Earlier this year, the biggest court in Europe voted that ISP’s should block The Pirate Bay. The Dutch copyright group BREIN won their case against the world’s most popular torrent site. But what does this mean for the future of torrenting?

The founders of the site had left the scene way before the site was shut, leaving no one to man it. Once TPB was blacklisted by most ISP’s many other sites took its place. Just as if nothing happened. So when asking what is the future of torrenting, the answer is who knows?

As fast as one gets shut down, five other take its place. It is the rapid nature of torrenting which keeps it prevalent and alive. The law suit against The Pirate Bay took nearly 7 years for it to go through, in this time the site dominated the piracy sector and resulted in millions of dollars not going to Hollywood. According to YIFY founder, piracy of movies will “not go away.”

When the founder of YIFY was asked about emerging piracy sites he said “My initial thoughts was ‘Oh s***, how did they even get this?! was I hacked?’ I was very impressed initially. After a while, and realizing they simply cloned this from the internet-archive Wayback Machine, that magic feeling went away,”