It’s services like Put.io that are behind why Google executives argue desktops will be irrelevant in three years, why Steve Ballmer says Microsoft is betting the bank on the cloud, and why storage stats for the newest gadget are becoming less and less important.Everything is going to the cloud.
Does it often feel like a waste of time to download something just to watch it once and then delete it? Then Don’t. Use Put.io. Put simply, Put.io fetches files from the Internet and allows you to either store them there or immediately stream them.
Put.io can get files from bittorrent, FTP, direct download and rapidshare, as well as from standard websites. It can even automatically keep up with downloads, pulling links from an RSS feed.
While the immediate question is one of legality, we do want to mention that, aside from pirated movies and television shows, there actually are a lot of videos out there available for download by bittorrent and other means. Beyond that, Put.io addresses the issue of legality and the DMCA, saying that “It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) and other applicable intellectual property laws. Responses may include disabling access for all users to the material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating submitters of the material ability to use the Put.io service at all.”
We gave the service a shot and it downloaded a 750 megabyte torrent in less then a minute. Although the service wasn’t able to stream the MKV format directly on the site (and we had the wrong DiVX player version), we gave it another shot with an AVI torrent and we had streaming video in under a minute. And Put.io stores the files so you can come back and access them again and again.
Currently, beta testers get 50 gigs of storage with 150 gigs of bandwidth. The bandwidth is not counted when downloading the files to the service, but instead when you access them – so repeated watching of a large file could surely reach that limit.
In addition to the basic functionality, you can share files and folders with friends and access files from anything that supports a browser, from your iPhone to your PS3. In addition to a mobile version, the service is planning to release an API as well as a Boxee plugin. The site is still in public beta, but Put.io is offering 300 invites to our readers. Simply visit this site and get an invite.
