21 Jul 2013
When Mega-Search.me launched earlier this year there was a flurry of news reports branding it a Mega search engine.
Technically the site doesn’t search Kim Dotcom’s Mega. Instead, it allows users to submit links to files hosted on Mega and makes this repository searchable.
Thus far nearly 50,000 links have been added and the site is particularly popular in France where Mega has a large user base.
This week the search engine launched a new sister site, Mega-Stream.me, which makes it possible to stream video and audio directly from Mega. Streaming links appear in the search results but users can also paste in their own Mega links.
The streaming portal requires a decent internet connection and the VLC plugin for FireFox or Chrome, but works quite well for the files we tested. Here is a streamable Mega video of the Pirate Bay documentary TPB AFK that should start playing from Mega’s servers right away.
MEGA-Stream.me
The developers of the site note that there may be some hiccups since the service is still in beta. It is not possible to skip forward and backward, but pausing works fine.
Whether Kim Dotcom and the Mega team are happy with the unofficial streaming portal has yet to be seen.
While Mega-Stream.me has plenty of legal uses, most links on Mega-Search.me point to copyrighted material. This didn’t go unnoticed by the Mega team either. When the site launched earlier this year MEGA disabled access to all files the search engine linked to, legal or not.
When the search engine added a proper take-down procedure and stopped using the Mega logo the counterattack stopped, but Dotcom stressed that his team would be keeping a close eye on sites that don’t play by the rules.
“You will be seeing us acting aggressively towards sites that try to mimic Mega and use our logos. We’ll also go after sites that don’t have any takedown facilities, because that’s the biggest problem,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak at the time.
Mega-Stream.me has no index of links and is reminiscent of Dotcom’s now defunct Megavideo site, so unless it breaches the Mega terms of use in another way, we don’t expect that it will be targeted by Mega’s team in the near future.