“Ololo.to” Farewells Userbase Following ACE’s DMCA Subpoena

• The popular streaming video engine “Ololo.to” is waving goodbye as legal pressure mounts.
• The operators of Ololo fear that ACE is close to identifying them, following a successful DMCA subpoena.
• Ololo grew successful in just two years and leaves a big gap behind now.

It looks like the operators of the streaming video search engine “Ololo.to” have feared legal prosecution by ACE (Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment) after the latter obtained a DMCA subpoena. The subpoena was pointed to the Tonic corporation, who is the registrant of the “.TO” domain space.

This was enough for Ololo operators to throw the towel, and they posted the following short message on the site, which is still online only to say goodbye to the userbase.

Ololo was a streaming video search engine, so it didn’t host any copyright-infringing information on the website. It used crawlers to search the databases of popular pirate destinations like ‘Openload,’ ‘Streamango,’ ‘Rapidvideo,’ ‘Verystream,’ ‘Viduplayer.com,’ ‘mystream.to,’ ‘upstream.to,’ ‘videobin.co,’ ‘prostream.to,’ ‘onlystream.tv,’ and hundreds more, so it saved users from the trouble of visiting individual platforms and searching them one by one. This made Ololo very popular in the community, especially following Alluc’s demise in 2018.

The ACE noticed Ololo’s success, and while the site didn’t host pirated data, it was still a piracy enabler. It is estimated that approximately two million people were visiting Ololo each month, so there was some serious traffic generating ad revenue for the operators of the specialized search engine.

Related: A New Wave of Pirate Domain Seizures by ACE Hits the Scene

The subpoena that was obtained by ACE came five days ago, so this has played a key role in Ololo’s latest move. However, whether or not the Tonic corporation had anything valid to share with ACE remains doubtful. In its FAQ, Tonic states that it does not maintain a whois database, so they value the registrant’s privacy up to a point. They do hold registrant information, but it could very easily be invalid or fake, and the verification process could be carried out using an anonymous email address and nslookup.

The service shutdown doesn’t mean that ACE will necessarily back up from the case, though. It is an important development, but the subpoena is still active, and Tonic is still required to hand over what details they have on Ololo’s operators. That would include names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, payment information, account updates, and account histories of the people operating the target domain.