February 07, 2009 by sharky
When OscarTorrents.com first took to the stage two years ago, they not only provided torrent coverage of the (leaked) 2007 Oscar-nominated films, but incorporated ‘user-voting’ into the mix. What began as a successful public torrent campaign that reached over 1 million visitors in the span of just two months was rather short-lived, however. For unknown reasons, OscarTorrents did not return in 2008. Flash ahead to 2009’s season which brings us a record-breaking 26 of 26 Oscar-nominated films available on P2P before the Academy Awards even happens (finished just today with the P2P release of Rachel Getting Married, according to Andy Biao from Waxy.org) - we’d assume this to be the perfect comeback year for OscarTorrents. Sadly, this was not to be.
BTARENA.org - Road To The Oscar Torrents 2009
There is one public tracker that has filled OT’s absence quite nicely, and that’s BTarena.org. They’ve come out with their own version of this year’s Academy Awards, complete with each nominations list organized by category of award, cleverly imitating the official Oscar website. The discerning difference being, you can actually download the movie torrents from BTARENA’s compilation: www.btarena.org/pages/oscar-2009
As expected, BTARENA offers torrents for all 26 Hollywood feature-length films in this year’s Oscars - available to everyone who has Internet access, a BitTorrent client and a web browser. No account required; no ratios to worry about.
For a public torrent site, BTARENA does things a little differently. First and foremost, they’re a torrent tracker. Secondly, they’re a release blog that offers links to their own torrents (not RapidShare DDLs).
Few Duplicate Torrents
Unheard of on most public trackers, you won’t find dozens and dozens of different torrent versions for the same (movie) release, common on Mininova and the other big torrent indexers. For a public site, it appears that BTArena hand-picks the torrents, and implements some heavy manual moderating of uploaded material. Here’s a search for "the wrestler", showing just one proper result:
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