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TV Delays Driving AU Viewers To Piracy
Astat1ne writes in with a story in The Register about the delays Australian TV viewers are experiencing getting overseas-produced series and how this is driving many of them to download the shows via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. The problem is compounded by the fact that Australian viewers are unable to download legal copies of the episodes from the US iTunes website. Quoting: "According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series, Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first-run series first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months."
Also, Doctor Who on BBC-America looks like crap. I guess it is due to the PAL-NTSC conversion, but everything on that channel looks awful.
I do the same thing with Bleach, a Japanese anime show. I can either wait a few years for the dubbed english version, or get the subbed Japanese show the same day in really high quality DivX. I don't know what it will take to convince the networks that people really would like to download content and have it at home. I also don't understand why networks don't just release shows for free with targeted advertisements. It seems that if you had people sign up with some sort of basic survey about where they live, how old they are, their interests, etc. advertisers gladly pay to have commercials interjected into the programming people download. Free, but with advertising, television downloads would be a big hit, I imagine.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
and the engineers who spent years designing it wouldn't get their earned pay.
Newsflash! The engineers already got paid while they were designing it.
It's fast. It's cheap. It's easy. And, best of all TVs are easily re-flipped for shows that don't need conversion. Channel surfing becomes challenging though....
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
Hell a couple month delay is driving people in the USA to do it. the last 13 episodes of Stargate SG1 have not aired yet, but you can get them where they are airing off Bittorrent. SciFI is dragging their feet and will try to take 6 motnhs of showing an episode and then 3 reruns to spread it out.
screw it, I'm already 1/2 way through the new season watching off a bittorrent in better picture quality than off my Cable signal on my 32 inch tv... (gotta love mpeg playback devices!)
I am also ahead of other shows as well.
It's bullshit and the network exec's know it. I'm just happy that people are forcing them by downloading it. Guess what rich assholes... the masses control the world, not you fuckers! get us upset and you will find a uprising is something you cant handle.
It is really that bad for a majority of programs especially scifi:
Alias for example, according to wikipedia it was shown 2005-2006, It has not been shown in australia yet with no plans from what i can see to have it shown, There is also no release date for the dvd. Star Trek: Voyager was the worst you finished in 2001, we finished in 2005.
With Battlestar galactica we just showed the last episode of season 2 a few hours ago (started at 11:40pm but would be shown anywhere between 10:30pm and 2:30am) You are half way through season 3.
Stargate sg1, we finished season 9 last month, Stargate Atlantis we are at season 2 episode 6.
Extras started their second season last week.
The O.C. Is one exception though, channel 10 actually showed episodes of this within a week of the us, You showed it on the 22nd we showed it on the 23rd or 24th (the Australian rules pre-season has started so some regions where delayed).
Most programs are put on a 6 month delay much of this is because of the difference in ratings periods, yours is around September ours started a few weeks ago.
Right now you can watch the 200th episode of a series that is only on episode 42 in the US.
Information wants to be free.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
In the US we have to wait for shows like Doctor Who. The us is currently about 18 months behind on Doctor Who! And I know there is no real excuse for it! At one point we were only a week behind. The suddenly for a year and a half there was NO Doctor Who to be had!
So this works BOTH ways! I am a HUGE Doctor Who fan. So it sucks that the BEST way to see it is over BitTorrent networks.