I'm not going to lie, that's what inspired me, but on a podcast I recently listened to: http://technophiliapodcast.com/2012/episode-25-interview-wit... They said they were planning on going legit and go with only indie movies, but that would be a bummer, and with the recent demonoid takedown, I thought it would be an interesting project to play around with.
movies.io founder here, I definitely said that in that podcast, but changed my mind since.
Going legit is too much trouble. The world of licensing is way too complex and antiquated - and we would've been forced to adopt DRM, which is a step back, in my opinion: http://amos.me/blog/2012/vision/
So, in short, movies.io's not going away, and yes we're keeping torrents.
Pretty much every movie out on video is available via one of the online platforms (currently iTunes, Amazon Instant, Netflix, and Redbox), but availability outside the US is still frustrating.
As always, when one copyright-infringing service is shut down, it's replaced by something more distributed and robust: it's called Library Genesis. As I understand it, they distribute the catalogue in incremental chunks via BitTorrent, which means there are multiple mirrors and no single point of failure.
That actually sounds like a great idea. I have nothing but time at the moment (start-up I was working for recently laid me off) I will definitely consider a project along those lines. Thanks for the recommendation.