Mega Launch Event Livestream: Watch Online As Kim Dotcom Introduce His Megaupload Successor

Kim Dotcom is launching Mega, his successor to Megaupload, via livestream, and here's your opportunity to watch the filesharing site release event live.

The launch, being streamed live online from his compound in New Zealand, is one of the most anticipated release events of the year, and this is your chance to witness all the proceedings for yourself.

The event starts at 8:30 p.m. New Zealand time, aka 2:30 a.m. Sunday, Eastern Standard Time, at which point the live stream will stop requiring a password to access, meaning everyone on the Web will be able to watch it live.

Click here to access the official UStream video of the event, which will be open as of 8:30 p.m. New Zealand time.

The site went live at 6:48 a.m. Saturday New Zealand time, which was chosen to coincide with the moment the first New Zealand law enforcement helicopter touched down at the Dotcom mansion there last year. Dotcom was arrested that fateful day, and Megaupload was taken down in one of the largest international copyright cases ever undertaken.

Dotcom announced the launch of Mega with the following tweet from his official Twitter account:

"As of this minute one year ago #Megaupload was destroyed by the US Government. Welcome to Mega.co.nz"

And it appears that the world had been eagerly anticipating its introduction, as Dotcom followed that tweet up with the following one, just ten minutes later, indicating just how popular it is already turning out to be:

"Wow. I have never seen anything like this. From 0 to 10 Gigabit bandwidth utilization within 10 minutes."

A little while later Dotcom quantified the level of Mega's popularity, and the rate of sign-ups is stunning, according to the following tweet from his official account:

"Site is extremely busy. Currently thousands of user registrations PER MINUTE."

It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that Mega is off to a strong start, as Megaupload.com at its peak accounted for a mind-blowing 4 percent of the world's Internet traffic, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

And Mega appears to be an even better, much more secure, version of Megaupload.

Dotcom's homepage Kim.com has some information about the new service posted, including how the encryption will provide added security to users:

"In the past, securely storing and transferring confidential information required the installation of dedicated software," the description reads. "The new Mega encrypts and decrypts your data transparently in your browser, on the fly. You hold the keys to what you store in the cloud, not us."

The information on Dotcom's site also breaks down one of the ways Mega will make file-sharing easier than it was with Megaupload:

"Before, you had to install the Mega Manager on every computer you used Megaupload from," the site explains. "Now, high-speed parallel batch uploading and downloading with resume capability are integral parts of the Mega website."

The catchphrase for the launch is "We Promise We Deliver - Bigger.Better.Faster.Stronger.Safer," and it appears that Dotcom is flying in the face of his critics and authorities in the United States and New Zealand, where he is fighting a long battle against extradition to the U.S.

That extradition case remains tied up in a New Zealand court, which in December pushed back hearings on the matter until August 2013 despite the urging of American authorities that it be expedited so Dotcom can face money laundering, racketeering and copyright infringement charges as soon as possible, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Rather than lay low until the extradition case is resolved, Dotcom will hold a news conference at his $25 million New Zealand home on Saturday, Eastern Standard Time (Sunday in New Zealand’s time zone.)

“It is a little bit provocative,” Charles Alexander, a partner specializing in intellectual property law at Minter Ellison in Sydney, Australia, told Bloomberg Businessweek after the announcement. “The U.S. may redouble their efforts to extradite him.”

Dotcom had told a New Zealand court that he would not bring back the Megaupload site, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, but it appears the 38-year-old -- who legally changed his name from Kim Schmitz to Kim Dotcom -- is moving forward with Mega nonetheless.

He may be emboldened by a series of setbacks in the case against him and the Megaupload empire. First came the postponement of his extradition case. Then last week an Ontario court denied a request by the U.S. government for Megaupload to turn over mirrored copies of 32 Canada-based computer servers to American authorities, stating that the request was too broad and its scope needed to be pared down if the court is to grant a warrant to obtain the mirror images.

Bloomberg Buinessweek wrote Wednesday that a screenshot of the new Mega site it obtained shows that it appears that it will use an "encryption generator, known as a 2048-bit RSA public/private key, that creates a unique alpha-numeric code used to unlock a file or a message. According to DigiCert Inc., the Lindon, Utah-based provider of Internet Security Certificates, cracking a 2048-bit RSA SSL code using a standard desktop computer would take 500,000 times longer than the age of the universe, which is about 13 billion years old."