Apple sure won’t be happy about this. If you have an Apple TV media streamer, you’ll know that it’s a bit of a walled garden — it’s difficult to stream any content that you haven’t purchased legitimately off the iTunes Store or from your iPhone or iPad. (And that’s the way that it should be, since Apple isn’t in the business of enabling piracy.) By cleverly hijacking the Apple TV’s AirPlay support, a new piece of software called TorrenTV can stream downloading torrents straight to your big screen.
If you have an iPhone or iPad, the Apple TV is a great little add-on that lets you throw content from your mobile device to the big screen. It’s somewhat limited in that it can only access the iTunes library of content, though, or files that you have stored on your other Apple products. According to TorrentFreak, TorrenTV creator ‘Carlos’ wanted his Apple TV to be able to play downloaded files from torrents, and wrote a piece of software that does exactly that.
Using the same code as Popcorn Time, TorrenTV looks pretty simple: find a torrent with a media file that you want to watch on your Apple TV, drag and drop that torrent onto the app, and voila: it’s playing on your Apple TV. Using AirPlay, and Popcorn Time’s torrent-streaming code, which downloads file segments sequentially to allow them to be played before the entire download is complete, TorrenTV looks like one of the easiest and most troublefree ways to break copyright law we’ve seen so far.
TorrenTV doesn’t index any files, which makes it less a piracy service and more of an interesting exercise in coding, which might give it some small reprieve when Apple inevitably attempts to have it taken down. Chromecast and Roku support is on the way, which would make it more broadly available — and that would make the $49 Google streaming stick even more attractive to anyone on an extreme budget. [TorrentFreak]