The best-known torrent site in the world now streams pirated content too. The Pirate Bay has added support for Torrents Time, a plugin that lets users stream torrents directly inside their browser. There's no need to download the torrent itself, or a BitTorrent client, or even the actual content — then lets the whole process run inside Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Chrome, on either Windows or OS X. The system is currently in beta, and has all the usual problems of pirated torrents (namely bad image quality and the need to wait for peers to seed the content), but it's still an extremely simple system.

Torrents Time can be added to any site

Torrents Time first launched at the beginning of this month, initially with support from popcorntime-online.io, a new web-based incarnation of Popcorn Time unrelated to prior forks, including the popular .io version. The Torrents Time plugin isn't just built for The Pirate Bay though — any torrenting site can add support.

The option to stream torrents now appears right alongside the download button.

A screenshot of a streaming torrent for The Revenant .

"By harnessing the incredible abilities of torrents, you can transform your website, in a matter of seconds to an amazing, simple to use streaming website," writes the Torrents Time team on their site. "With Torrents Time you'll be able to [...] generate more revenue than with any other monetization company while putting a stop to annoying ads." VentureBeat reports that one or two other sites have already added support for Torrents Time, while popular Pirate Bay alternative Kickass Torrents is currently working on integrating the plugin.

Torrents Time isn't the first solution for streaming torrents directly inside the browser, but previous iterations of the technology have had their drawbacks. As TorrentFreak notes, some streaming-torrents sites simply grabbed content via HTTP rather than via peer-to-peer connections, meaning they quickly ran out of bandwidth. Another used technology provided by free VPN service Hola, although Hola itself is hardly trusted after it was caught selling users' internet connections to botnets.

Is Torrents Time pulling any dirty tricks on its users? It's difficult to say for certain. Right now, it seems the plugin is monetized by pointing people towards a paid VPN service, while its website promises that ad servers will be "coming soon." Having a source of income means it's less likely to mess with its users, but as with any sort of activity relating to online piracy, there's no guarantee that everything's above board.

Correction: The Torrents Time team is not part of the Popcorn-Time.se team, as initially stated. It is an independent group.