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Aussie TV Networks Fight BitTorrent
An anonymous reader writes "It seems impatient TV viewers have discovered BitTorrent in Australia mainly because the networks there are so slow; programs are at times behind by up to 8 months! According to an independent study, it takes an average of four months to watch the latest episodes of top-rated shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives. There are now calls for TV networks to consider offering episodes for download at a small cost."
I'd gladly pay a feww dollars/month to download TV eps (sans commericals)- if I don't have to mess with torrents (and it comes down at my full 3meg/sec)
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
If you were as much a farscape fan as I am, you would understand the frustration in not being able to get the peacekeeper wars by any legal means in Australia.
The dissapointing thing is that there is no reason why this shouldn't be available in Oz right now. Its not even like film, where the latest releases only have a certain number of reels to go around the world.
If I can get a high quality copy easily over the internet, why can't the networks figure out how to do it for a profit?
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
New Zealand has the exact same problem. There are shows I've heard about that were on in the US 3-4 years ago that will never show here...
Ah, television - teacher, mother, secret lover. Why must you treat me so badly?
If the TV networks did decide to offer downloads at a cost, would they still include advertisements in the download, or would the cost of the download be sufficient to make up for the lost advertising revenue?
I'm fairly certain it takes 8 months to change all instances of "Hello" to "G'day!" and all instances of "fries" to "chips." Really, aside from that, Australian people aren't so different after all.
It's not just things being 8-12 months (on average) behind, say, the US or UK, it's also the insistence of the commercial networks (specifically Channel 9) to drop series without notice, schedule program episodes in the wrong order, or change the scheduling of episodes at the last minute.
I'm not surprised that people are taking television programming into their own hands in this country...
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I got StarGate Atlantis because I didn't think they were going to show it at all. However, now they have (gah!). That's not the only reason I'd use it though: the networks are notorious for rescheduling shows at inconvinient times - or they drop them altogether! So hence we need to use BitTorrent.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I don't understand how media companies can be so far behind on figuring out digital distribution over the internet...
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
With my dialup internet connection, it would take an average of four months to download it from Bittorent!
riveting stuff... of course american networks should just make their tv shows available for a fee, and allow international customers with a valid credit card or paypal to purchase the content too. I'm sure however, that the networks make far more money hawking the tv shows abroad to other networks after they've had their run in the states.
Yay me! ^^
Its not like we dont have these satellites and stuff that can beam programming around the planet in the course of a few seconds, especially for english speaking countries like the UK and Australia... even if its a few days behind, its better than 8 months.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
My limited knowledge of Australian TV has shown me that Aussies prefer BBC programmes over what's showing in the US.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Typical Corporate response: Fight the technology, instead of the real issue. Lets say they can defeat the torrent, then what? You have to fight every other method of downloading the episode, and then just for fun lets say they succeed at that, you'd have to fight someone in another country sending someone a tape of the episode.
The correct answer is: If this is truly affecting your business, then you need to provide the customer with what they want, in a way that will allow you to realize a profit. Get the episodes on in a timely fashion, and they will watch.
Don't Tread on Me
These spinoff shows are getting more and more ridiculous.
Still...could be a winning combination. The desperate housewives lost on a deserted island slowly getting killed one by one, interspaced with plenty of swimming in lagoons in bikini scenes. Any TV execs out there listening?
If it takes 30 years for a prog to reach alpha centauri surely Ozzies can wait 8 months. And you call us Poms whingers! Join the bloody queue mate.
Which is the greater evil: ignorance or apathy? I dont know and I dont care.
There are a number of articles that describe a process known as "broadcatching." Basically it uses RSS feeds from certan TV torrent sites and a BitTorrent client. EnGadget has an article describing this, and how to do it. It's what I do and I don't even live outside of the US! Shows usually come out an hour or two before they broadcast in my local area, which means, for example, I can download the HDTV version of my favorite show (without commercials) and finish watching it even before it starts in my time zone. Amazing!
Movies too. Some of the most interesting movies get released at the same time world-wide, but for others we're up to six months behind the northern hemisphere - I'm in NZ, not Australia, but the problem is similar.
In the case of NZ, though, there is an extra obstacle in the form of a telecommunications monopoly keeping a stranglehold on all ISPs so that all broadband accounts are capped -- usually at 10 GB per month -- though some allow downloads beyond that limit, only at dial-up speeds. This means that downloading isn't quite as viable an option here as it is in Australia.
If Canadians weren't largely capable of getting American satelite signals on the grey and black markets for the last 2 decades then chances are we could have wound up in a similar pickle where if CTV or CBC or Global didn't pick up a show, we'd simply not be able to see it for months. Although Canadian cable and satellite offer ABC, NBC, and CBS the primary US Networks, and have for decades. Thank goodness for geography.
Anyway, as far as Bit torrent goes, I don't think Australia will be the first country to authorize it's TV stations to go with Bit torrent "broadcasting". I predict it will be a Scandanavian country that will break the mold, and pave the way for TV distribution for the next 5 years before the next best thing comes along.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The West Wing is currently stalled about halfway through Season Five in Australia on free-to-air. The last episode of Season Six screens in the US this coming week. The channel that has the rights over here won't even state whether it's coming back at all, let along when. Pay TV (cable or satellite) isn't a solution - one cable channel is currently screening repeats of Season One). In addition, I own the first four seasons on DVD and intend to purchase S5 and S6 on DVD as soon as they become available. So, you'll just have to pardon me for not feeling particularly guilty about having seen ripped episodes that are yet to air down here.
mainly because the networks there are so slow; programs are at times behind by up to 8 months!
Or sometimes not at all.
I don't know what's worse... not getting the shows at all or getting one or two episodes before the network decides to air it at 2am every second Tuesday, which ends up being a repeat anyway. And then finally taking it off the air without even so much as a "Fuck you, we're outta here."
As an example, it took four years to air two seasons of Scrubs and that was with about six randomly omitted episodes. Then they showed three episodes randomly from the first dozen episodes of season 3 and then took it off the air completely.
If I had to pay a few bucks a week to get my regular shows as non-stream, non-DRM files, I'd gladly fork out for it. I travel a lot so I like to transfer stuff onto my laptop so I have something to watch to pass the time; If I have to be constantly streaming something or can't transfer the file to another computer I own, then forget it.
Yep, that most definitely pisses me off (though I don't tape). StarGate, even a few years ago, got shifted around ridiculously (it happens to be one of my favourite shows). I can see that this same thing is going to happen to BattleStar Galactica. Time to start downloading!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I never understood the concept behind either paying for TV show downloads, or for the broadcast networks rejecting the medium. Last I checked, broadcast television access was free. It's free because they show several segments of advertising in the middle of the show. Why would the medium matter to these companies? Why stick with television sets?
The advantage of downloading stuff is that you can watch it whenever you want. My schedule may not permit me to watch the shows I want. If you give me the same exact show with the same exact ads over the internet, I will gladly watch it! With the ads! I don't give a damn about the show not being ad-free, and I don't give a damn about them even developing a technology preventing you from fast-forwarding past the advertising. I'll watch the damn advertising, just like I watch it on TV. Just let me watch the damn show at the computer if the need strikes me! You lose NOTHING. Even if someone does fast-forward through the commercials, someone else will watch the same file TWICE, thus increasing their exposure to the advertising. Is this not an acceptable trade-off?
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
Yeah, we don't want people thinking that the nickname "Oz" comes from the pronunciation of the first syllable of "Australia" or anything.
- Chuq
The title is a bit misleading in its current form , after reading the artical i find that it should be "Aussie TV Networks sit around doing little ". ,German TV dubs programs and i hate dubbing(that and i dont own a TV anymore though i do have access to one if needed).
. ,People hate adverts (20 minute shows that last 45 minutes due to 25 minutes of intersperced Crap for things that i do'nt need or want and am less likely to buy after being forced to view the tripe that they purvay) and finaly its just so dammed cool at the moment ( i ran out of good reasons).
This is a world wide phenominon and i personaly download some TV shows , One simple fact why i do it here
Its more than just the fact the TV shows are not broadcast in a region in a timely fashion or that they want an origional show when they want it
DVD-/+R/rw and CD-r/rw are far cheaper than comparitive vhs tapes , Having the show exactly when you want it without having to worry about setting the recorder (etc) is relaxing
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
There are far more high rating American programs the British ones. The current top twenty are all American or Australian. "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" are the current heavy hitters with various CSI variants continuing to have a solid impact too. Data for the last ratings period.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
that other English speaking countries are unable to make their own TV shows and must therefore import everything from the US (especially stuff like the West Wing).
Not that the US would run their shows (except rarely on PBS) , but maybe they could make something successful at home.
The beacon of Western civilization.
Farmix
? I thought it was due to the yellow brick roads , emerald citys and perhaps the sounding of AUS(Oz)trallia.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Why do Americans need to watch The Biggest Loser?
They can just walk out the front door to see overweight idiots.
SF television programs have never been treated seriously by the television stations here in Australia. Babylon 5 was initially shown *out* *of* *order* and the "Footy Show" would routinely displace following SF shows by up to half an hour because the show was running over time. When I was a kid, it took several summer holidays to *never* see the entire television adaptation of "The Tripods" because the station would just pull the series when regular programming returned. Even now, any SF series that do screen are on late at night, and delays of more than a season are common (i.e. Buffy, Ange, X-Files). This delay means the Internet is loaded with spoilers.
For these reasons, we would originally get friends to send video tapes from the USA. For these reasons, a lot of people now use the file transfer technology du-jour (Napseter, BitTorrent, Direct Connect, whatever) to grab shows.
As the networks have for a very long time shown that they do not value SF programming, they have absolutely no sympathy from me. If the shows had screened in a timely manner, not been relegated to graveyard slots and not been chopped and changed, people would have not bothered with all this effort and just watched live to air. And I'd get cable TV if it was any good, try getting a cable package that *doesn't* include sport and a bunch of other junk I don't want). If we got to keep SBS and ABC, I'd gladly sacrifice the lot to the FTA as I am bloody well sick of lifestyle and reality shows.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I think the real unsung heroes of this are the kind souls who actually do the capture and encoding, ready for the torrents to start flying about the world.
Case in point: Doctor Who: The End of the World
The most recent Doctor Who aired 7:00 pm Saturday night, UK time. By Sunday morning, Australian time, there were enough torrent seeds to have it a high quality 350MB DivX on my hard drive in less than an hour.
Given the 11 hour time zone difference, that's a very quick turnaround, and a very professional piece of capture and encoding. I don't know who originally sourced it (not even an ugly watermark to quench his/her ego!), but my warm thanks to you. There's no sign of the local broadcaster acquiring it for at least the next 6 months.
This is a complete non-surprise to anyone in Australia that a) wants to watch TV and b) is aware of this Internet thingo and c) has heard of BitTorrent.
Not only do we often have to wait months, if not years to actually GET a series (assuming its not exclusive to one of the cable TV services, which STILL aren't available in many areas), they often find ways to screw them up.
Examples:
- Season one of Scrubs was shown by one of the networks. Season two started - six episodes into the season, if I recall correctly.
- Desperate Housewives just returned last night, after a three week break because there was something else on the networks wanted to cover
When you can download the entire season (probably in HDTV) and watch it without ads and without having to wait weeks for the networks to get their shit together (and without having to pay AU$60/month on cable, if you can even get it, which I can't, whine!), its not surprising.
(Add me to the list of people that would happily, ecstatically, and joyfully shell out money to buy fairly priced xvid/divx versions of US TV shows that I simply can't watch over here - shit, I'd probably then go and buy them on DVD as well)
You know how much Australian TV SUXS???????
All that I can watch is the Simpsons which runs for 30 minutes and more often than not it is a re-run! Everything else is the crappy "realty" TV or "American Idol" rip offs.
It's bloody annoying mate.
There are at least three things certain in life:
When cable TV was beginning to offer premium channels in the U.S. the expectation was that since you were paying for the channels, you wouldn't have to watch commercials.
That didn't last.
Now, commercials are even being shown in many movie theaters in the U.S. The commercials are shown during the time advertised as the start of the movie, so it's not like you only see them if you're early to a show.
I'm not surprised one bit that people are retaliating against the sensory overload of obnoxious product propaganda, both in TV and in the cinema.
The reason we download TV shows here is simple - the networks don't have their shit together!
The world according to Networks Australia:
The TV guides are just that - a rough guide to what we think we might be airing, but don't take it as gospel, we will alter it at a moments notice and air your favorite programs at 3 in the morning when we suddenly discover every other crap has been played 4 times already.
When we do play a season, we will constantly move its time slot and play them back to back to finish it when the footy season starts.
Once we discover a program that earns good ratings we will repeat it at every opportunity and buy all the spins offs and flog them to death until you are sick of it. See CSI as a good example.
We will try new program material at 11pm when nobody is watching. When it starts to build a following we will move it to 4:15am every time the planets align. When you find it again we'll axe it citing poor ratings.
I am sick of trying to find my favorite programs (what the fuck happened to West Wing?) and decided to download them and watch them whenever I have the time or inclination. (side note - we have Tivo type technology that will automatically record shows I like whenever they are on - dammit).
Stop bitching about the customer and give them what they want!
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
Agreed.
Watching Big Brother is marginally more stimulating than watching "snow".
Of course, the late night Big Brother - those nights where the "contestants" are all asleep and thus incredibly boring - makes for great "car crash" viewing. Watching the poor host, a guy with little to no prior TV experience, try to invent entertainment out of thin air for a couple of hours can be pretty hilarious.
"Oh look, someone's just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep again. Let's watch that in slow motion, from every conceivable angle, to see whether there was a wardrobe malfunction". 2-3 minutes pass, then "No, it doesn't look like there was. Still, if there was, woo-hoo. If there's anyone who'd like to phone in to talk about whose nipple would make the best viewing, do so now - our lines are wide open"...
On and on, show after show, for weeks on end - the guy hosting this endless stream of thought rambling deserves some sort of award, but I'm not sure which one. He's a modern day Jack Kerouac.
However, if they don't get viewers, they don't get advertisers. If people use BitTorrent to get shows they want to watch because they won't show these tv shows, then tough to the networks.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If the commercial networks don't want me watching then that's no major loss for me, but I own a part of ABC, as does every taxpayer in the country. I like their content and the way they are pushing new technology in terms of broadband video on demand, digital radio, and digital television multicasting. Not only is it a bloody shame they're neglecting their viewership, but it's our responsibility to let them know that we don't like it before it becomes the norm (the excuse they used was that "the other stations are doing it").
I urge everyone who is as offended as I am to contact the ABC and let them know how you feel. With a large response to the watermarking they _will_ look into it. You can contact the ABC here.
Here's what I sent:
You may use that as I guide if you must.
I've been ordering DVDs of my favourite shows on Amazon. This is technically illegal and costs me money. Pshaw!
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
8 months for a TV show to get here would be *very* good. Usually it's a lot worse.
Take this example, Star Trek: Voyager. I believe the final episode aired in the US in mid 2001? We saw it late last year... That's getting close to FOUR YEARS BEHIND.
It's really quite sad.
And to top that, our two main Pay TV operators here, Foxtel and Optus are even worse then the free-to-air broadcasters when it comes to airing new shows.
Not to mention that the networks are going all insane over PVRs, doing *everything* possible to make sure their guide data does not go near PVRs, including sending cease and desist letters to PVR groups dedicated to Australian users. These groups have had to take more borderline legal approaches in order to have their beloved devices to continue working here.
Then add into the mix that all the main free-to-air broadcasters usually "mistakenly" go over their allocated timeslots by a minimum of 8 minutes, a lot of the time closer to 15 during prime-time, and I'm not talking once or twice, I'm talking *every* weeknight
I'm starting to get the feeling, "Why bother"? Now, time to find a torrent for a TV show...
</rant>
We don't download them to watch. As part of the free trade agreement between the US and Australia, we are providing you with off-shore storage in case of disaster.
Its all about disaster recovery these days and being the caring nation, we're just trying to do our part.
fish and pipes
According to an independent study, it takes an average of four months to watch the latest episodes of top-rated shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives. Four months is impressive. It would take me much longer to make it through an episode of "Desperate Housewives."
Exactly right.
Since setting up the HTPC, there are two competing digital content pipes into my house. Either way, it all ends up as MPEG2 files that I watch at my leisure, so I'm indifferent about delivery method.
First pipe: Cost is AU$70/month. Speed is 512kbps. (Sort-of broadband ADSL connection.)
Second pipe: Cost is free. Speed is is some 100+Mbps. (FTA digital tv).
It takes a special kind of incompetence from the media businesses to make the former a more attractive proposition.
Channel 7's behaviour around Arrested Development and Scrubs has cost them several hundred ad exposures to my household of four alone! Idiots.
TV content is too important to entrust to the network programmers and their devious schemes.
-Thetan.
No, no, no. It just seems like four months when you're watching it.
As an expat working in Africa, it's next to impossible to watch any decent tv. I've watched many series - like Farscape, Stargate, etc *entirely* off the Internet. Whenever I travel, I bring my dvd collection up to date of the series that are available, and trash the divx's. The point is, I'd do this even if I was still living in the UK! I want to watch stuff when it's convenient for *me* not for the tv company or to fit into a prime time advertising slot. What's more I'd be happy to pay for it. "Piracy" isn't as simple as "theft" any more. It's about filling a consumer demand, and it's about time the distributors recognised this.
Other countries have to run behind the US due the the insane American custom of spreading 22 new episodes out over 44 weeks (or thereabouts), and alternating a few new episodes, then a few reruns. No other country's TV-watching population would tolerate this, so they can't start to show a series until it's already been running in the US for six months, to ensure that they can actually show a 22 episode season over 22 weeks.
If you ever meet someone with an "Australian" accent ask them if they come from NZ if they do they will be pleased you noticed the difference and if not who worries about upsetting Australians.
kidding I like Australians except when there betting us at sport (which means I don't like them a lot of the time ;))
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
If you ever meet someone with an "Australian" accent ask them if they come from NZ if they do they will be pleased you noticed the difference and if not who worries about upsetting Australians.
You know that works for Americans and Canadians, too.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as