Netflix recently struck deals with several major Hollywood studios, agreeing to delay new DVD release availability to Netflix subscribers by 30 days in exchange for expanded access to streaming film titles. Now Netflix appears to have struck a deal with independent film producer Relativity Media that will allow them to enter a pay TV window traditionally dominated by HBO, Showtime and Starz. Under the terms of the deal, Netflix gets exclusive rights to distribute Relativity content (of which there isn’t much) instead of premium cable channels. While the companies call it “groundbreaking,” it’s a small win and seems to contribute to growing confusion by consumers as to how, when and where you’ll be able to get films.

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The Pirate Bay crew had already essentially been disbanded, the site dissected, and its remnants sold to a somewhat dubious company that simply wants to turn the site’s visitors into little P2P cash cows.

So an announcement today over at the official Pirate Bay blog that they’re officially shutting down the site’s tracker probably surprises nobody. According to the site, they’re not shutting the site down however – they’ll still annoy the entertainment industry by going trackerless and using the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for file distribution:

The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service….

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date.

According to the site, with the use of a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), downtime and outages should be less of a problem. According to a follow up report at Torrent Freak, the site owners are apparently trying to convince other BitTorrent portals to ditch torrents entirely and decentralize, perpetuating the entertainment industry’s game of whack a mole. Sweden’s The Legal has more on how this impacts the site founders’ court case.

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