This past May, we were among the first to tell the world about a pirate TV service called cCloud TV. The service made a name for itself by collecting live streams from a wide range of free and pay TV channels including HBO,
Now, after what the cCloudTV team says has been “months of spending hours and hours to make the future of IPTV,” cCloud TV is back with hundreds of new channels and a host of new features.
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For those unfamiliar with the service, cCloud TV is essentially a portal that aggregates IP TV streams from around the web. It doesn’t host any feeds per se, instead providing an interface that allows users to view any one of the available feeds in a single place. This includes both freely available video streams as well as pirated content from pay TV channels such as HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and more.
In an email to BGR, the developers behind cCloud TV said they have released a brand new update to cCloud TV, which is a web-based app accessible to both computers and mobile devices. According to the email, cCloud TV Beta v0.6, which the developers refer to as “Rise,” includes the following key features:
- cCloud TV now has multiple servers: ccloudtv.org and ccld.io
- New HTMl5, Flash, and VLC player to make streaming more user friendly.
- Support for Google Glass, Oculus Vr, Leapmotion, Chromebook, Chrome Extension and many more devices has been added.
- Link Status Check: Similar to YouTube, links uploaded by users will be automatically checked. If the links are valid it will be published, otherwise it will be denied.
- New User Interface: Included in the many features of the new user interface is dual audio streaming with English as the default for the VLC media player. For example, channels sporting dual audio such as ‘English/Russian’ can be watched using either language now with VLC player
- Channel Organization by Category: Top 10 channels have been added and a spot for special events’ links. Users can maintain these channels without having to login. Whenever the link of a channel goes down it will show status for the link as offline/upload where anyone can upload IPTV link with working link in m3u8 format.
- cCloud TV web app now has flash player as a default player which makes the streaming for users even more user friendly except when installing VLC web plugin. The all new flash player is Chromecast ready.
- cCloud TV now has plugin for XBMC/Kodi with iVue EPG support ready.
- cCloud TV plugin for Plex has been improved and it is based on cCloud Framework.
- Filter (search) is across all field. For example, you can use ‘Sports’ to get only sports channel listing. To search for channels that were updated/added that day, use the YYYY/MM/DD format. For example, ‘20150928’ to see channels that were updated/added that day. You can also use ‘English’ for only English channels, and so on.
- Server status include: Online/Offline/Added Recently.
- Sorting is also across all field. Use the Up/Down arrow to sort alphabetically. If you want to use Sort and Filter together then Sort first and then use the Filter.
- Offline/Upload or Submit/Upload allows users to upload links for down channels. Simply click the button. Copy the token and paste it in the next page that follows along with a working stream for that channel. The update is carried out in real time.
- The VerifiedOn column shows when the channel was last tested which is based on available server resources. As a community you can help by running the tester by clicking on that column. A channel token will be presented that needs to be copied/pasted into the following page. As simple as that.
In our brief testing, we did find that the new version is smoother than older builds, and the addition of support for multiple different streaming standards indeed provides a better user experience across most devices. Streams still come and go as old feeds are taken down and new ones are added, but cCloud TV now supports hundreds of channels so there’s likely something for everyone.
