Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 1:14 AM
Broadcatching (and integration) must be picking up. It’s now early Wednesday, and there are just over 60,000 completes on Monday’s “24″ episodes. That’s a lot of viewers, and a lot of data — over 20,000 GB being thrown around the net.
For those who don’t know about it, “broadcatching” is making use of BitTorrent P2P software (usually Azureus) and RSS to automatically download (HD)TV shows from BitTorrent tracker sites like btefnet.net. With an Azureus RSS plugin or optional TVTAD software, the RSS feed for the BitTorrent site is loaded and scanned for shows that match your criteria. If any shows match, the corresponding .torrent file is downloaded and opened with your BitTorrent client. The show is downloaded from the swarm of other people grabbing the show as well. Lately, there seems to be a significant amount of users sharing TV shows, making for very fast download speeds.
As for the legality of sharing TV shows on the internet, I’m not yet aware of any positive or negative repercussions. I would be interested to hear of some cases, though. I can’t imagine that it makes too much difference to TV execs just yet, as the broadcatching crowd is generally a techie bunch, but look what happened with Napster and the whole digital music scene. I can see where issues might come into play, as BitTorrent-downloaded TV shows are pre-edited to remove commercials, so the advertisers would no longer be making their money. For now, though, I’ll enjoy my 350 MB HDTV no-commercial episodes of “24″ and others a short few hours after their official broadcast.
Update: Well, it looks like I spoke just hours too soon. The MPAA is now after TV sharing sites. Btefnet.net appears to be offline for now. So much for automation. I’m not aware of any other TV sharing sites that offer RSS.
5/25/2005 Update: There are a small few BitTorrent TV sites on the net again, however they have no RSS feed as of this writing. Check out BT-TV.net and EZTV@EFNet.
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I heard the guys at TWiT(.tv) talk about this, although I had never heard of it.
Some of them were saying how in theory, they could cancel their Cable TV and watch TV all off of this kind of thing. And only see the shows they want and no commercials! Seems like a good plan to me.
-Mike
That’s what I’ve been doing for a long while. I don’t even know when some of my favorite shows (Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, CSI, Family Guy, Numb3rs, etc.) are on — they just show up on my media box.
It seems like a great idea, especially since some of those shows overlap in time slots, so I dont get to watch them all. I’m deffinatly building a PVR this summer, so hopefully that will save me that pain of missing some of them.