TV Torrents — When Piracy Is Easier Than Purchase

An anonymous reader writes "NBC's recent withdrawal from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. Online media stores such as iTunes, Amazon and Walmart have never been able to compete with the pirates on price, or freedom and flexibility — as the content they sell is typically wrapped in restrictive DRM. The one advantage that legal purchase offered was ease of use. CNET looks into the issue, and discovers that with mature open-source media players such as Miro supporting BitTorrent RSS feeds, it is actually trivially easy for users to subscribe to their favorite shows. Want to wake up to the latest episode of The Colbert Report, Top Gear or any of hundreds of TV shows automatically downloaded and waiting for you? CNET offers an easy three step guide."

Comments

EZTV + uTorrent + XBMC

[hansamurai]

I simply use EZTV to find the torrents and RSS feeds, uTorrent to download them automatically with its built in RSS reader, and XBMC on my Xbox to watch them comfortably in my living room.

Fox has there shows online with less ad's then on.

[Joe The Dragon]

Fox has there shows online with less ad's then on tv and it download a lot faster then an torrent.

Re:NBC Offers Their Shows on Their Site

[Lev13than]

If you go to www.nbc.com there's a big ol' link right there at the top: Watch Episodes. Why would you pay for or "steal" something that they're giving away for free anyway? Works great in Firefox/Kubuntu for me as well...

Because NBC won't stream videos to foreign IP addresses, and running through an open proxy is rarely fast enough for video.

TV Piracy is a godsend...

[Creamsickle]

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.

Umm, you have that wrong...

[d3ac0n]

Let me just correct your math there:

Buy:
Money Cost = $49.00
Time Cost = ~ 1-2 hours of working time
Misc Cost = Loss of ability to spend or invest that $49.00 in something else
Benefit = DVD box set or other "digital" item.

Steal:
Money Cost = $0.00
Time Cost = 0 as torrents are automated and can be downloaded while sleeping or at work earning $49.00.
Misc Cost = none
Benefit = DVD box set or other "digital" item, $49.00 saved, no productive time wasted, able to invest or spend that $49.00 on something else.

Result:

Buy Cost > Steal Cost

Sorry, Piracy wins again. YARR!

Don't forget about his ABC holdings

[MushMouth]

Remember Jobs himself is the largest shareholder (7.5%) of Disney, which owns ABC. The next largest shareholder owns less than 1%.

RTFS

[Scudsucker]

From the summary:

NBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content.

System requirements for Amazon's Unbox:

• System Requirements
  Microsoft Windows XP or Vista (32-bit versions)
  Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher
  1.5 GHz processor & 512 MB RAM
  Broadband connection

Re:comma

[jmac1492]

Punctuation.