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TV Piracy is Next

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-always-miss-episode-one dept.

Blackfire writes "Why is a TV executive so agitated about online pirates? Because he, like most media honchos, has seen the scary numbers indicating that the next big craze in illegal file-sharing is not music, not movies, but television." Frankly I'm amazed that movies caught on before TV since there's so much more TV, and they tend to be smaller files than movies.

4 of 774 comments (clear)

  1. Uh, no. by Paska · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sorry, I don't buy this crap. I used to work in Win Television (Australia's largest regional television station, 7million viewers) and I can say that privacy was not even a minor concern.

    The major concern executives are having, is trying to ensure video tape operations do not put in commercials into the wrong aspect ratio, The shows airing on TV do not mean crap to the executive, it's the commercials paying his wage.

    I was trained to make sure, in the worst case situation. That the commercials go to air, even if that meant the TV show itself was just one nice black screen.

  2. TV Piracy is a godsend... by absolut_kurant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No way I could otherwise watch unsynchronized TV shows (I live in Austria), there isn't even the option of e.g. watching the Simpsons in English here (except waiting a few years for the DVD release). So much subtle nuance is lost and so many glaring errors are made in translation it's not even funny. Very frustrating. My thanks to all Americans making their TV shows available via Bittorrent.

    --
    Yes.
  3. Re:TV episodes from BitTorrent by nano2nd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The industry SHOULD and COULD adapt to this by offering their own high quality copies of TV episodes via BitTorrent.

    The TV companies would be in control of their content again and would be free to include advertising. This is a whole new distribution medium for them with virtually no operating costs (due to the highly distributed nature of BitTorrent). Any revenue generated by advertising in this channel would be total profit!

    I would be happy to download "official" torrents that included ads rather than take my chances with dodgy video and lipsync etc.

    Unfortunately, the TV companies will probably try to wrap it up in some evil DRM to prevent other people cutting the ads out and seeding the high-quality ad-free versions.

    --
    G4 Hackintosh
  4. Ahem, hello? http://tvtorrents.net/ by JPamplin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    *A friend of mine* has been enjoying http://tvtorrents.net/ for a while now. And, yes it is the best thing - No TiVo, no ads, HDTV quality and usually 350MB per hour of DivX encoded video. Plus you can search.

    Just check the site the day after airing, and pull down the torrent. The HDTV-LOL versions are some of the best for Galactica, Lost, all the hot shows.

    According to my friend, that is. ;-)

    JP

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    Stiny! Get me a danish!