TV Torrents: When 'piracy' is easier than legal purchase
NBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of users of Apple iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. Could this be the push that brings easy-to-use 'piracy' to the masses? This article discusses the issues, and then provides step-by-step instructions to setup a computer to automatically download any of hundreds of TV shows as soon as they are broadcast and put online.
With Apple's recent lovers's spat with NBC making the headlines, it seems like a good opportunity to examine the state of the online TV downloads, be they paid or 'pirated'. The end result of the dispute between the companies is that NBC's shows, which currently count for approximately one third of iTunes' TV show sales will no longer be available for sale at Apple's iTunes store. Customers wishing to purchase NBC's shows will now need to go through Amazon's Unbox service. While Unbox supports users of Windows and TiVo, Mac users, as well as those millions of iPod users are left out in the cold. Linux geeks, and those customers who have purchased divx/avi capable portable music players are also excluded, but this small subset of the market were equally ignored by Apple.
The Apple/NBC dispute, of course, only affects US based consumers. Foreigners, due to the lengthy delay between a show airing in the US in markets abroad, have already been driven to illegal file sharing. In Australia, where the broadcast of US shows is typically delayed between 22-30 months, many viewers have given up on waiting for their favorite shows to appear on the tube, and have instead turned to BitTorrent. According to a report published in 2006, "Australians are responsible for 15.6 percent of all online TV piracy, bested only by Britain, which accounts for 38.4 percent. The US lags behind in third position at 7.3 percent."
The legitimate and legal online media stores cannot compete with file sharing on price. Furthermore, as iTunes, Amazon, Walmart and the other stores all wrap their media in restrictive Digitial Rights Management (DRM), they cannot compete on freedom, flexibility and the ability to transfer purchased media to other devices. The only areas where they have the upper hand are in quality, and ease of use.
Warner Brothers' China division, in a rare act of intelligence on the part of a major media company, demonstrated significant savvy last year when they began selling cheap, legitimate, high quality DVDs of movies within days of the theatrical release. By pricing the discs at around 12 yuan (approximately US$1.50), Warner is hoping to make cost a non-issue, thus allowing them to compete in one area where they hold the upper hand: Quality. Instead of taking a chance with on a low quality, shaky-camcorder copy of a film, Chinese consumers can get a high quality copy of the movie at a reasonable price, all while enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that you can get knowing that you've helped to pay for some small portion of a a Hollywood star's private jet.
Apple's iPod makes up more than 70 percent of the overall mobile player market. With those customers now completely cut-off from NBC's offerings, the ease-of-use advantage of legitimate purchase has been lost. While camcorder copies of films still make up a decent portion of movies on file sharing networks, the widespread availability of digital television and TV tuners in PCs means that it is trivially easy to find high-quality copies of TV shows on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay.
It's taken some time, but the 'piracy' path has finally gotten to be more user-friendly and easy to use than iTunes and the other pay-services. Miro, a multi-platform RSS and BitTorrent enabled media client is now very stable, polished and fast. Using a tool such as this, and a couple minutes of configuration to subscribe to your favorite shows, it's now possible for users worldwide to wake up to the latest episode of The Daily Show, without paying a penny, or being locked into a restrictive DRM scheme. It's still illegal of course, but that hasn't stopped the millions of file sharers who have made BitTorrent responsible for more than 25% of all Internet traffic.
It's worth noting at this point, that for people in India, the Middle East and other markets ignored by the major players, Linux users (for which iTunes, Amazon and Walmart's media stores do not work), Apple customers who wish to watch shows made by NBC or another network that won't play ball with Apple, or Windows users who are simply not willing to submit themselves to the shackles of DRM, illegal downloads are the only way to watch TV shows on their computers and portable media players. I'm not advocating illegal activity, but merely stating the facts.
If a user wishes to break the law (or they live in a country that doesn't respect US copyright law), lets see exactly how they could go about setting up their computer to auto-download their favorite TV shows. This information is, of course, for educational purposes only and I in no way encourage anyone to violate copyright laws.
Step 1: Download and install the Miro media player, which is available for Linux, Mac and Windows.
Step 2: Locate an RSS feed for a TV show you want to watch. One fantastic source of these is the website tvRSS.net
Navigate through the list of TV shows on the tvRSS website, and find a desired show.
Screenshot of tvRSS website
(Credit: tvRSS.net)On the web-page for the show, right click on the link to the RSS feed of that show, and copy the URL location.
Screenshot of tvRSS website
(Credit: tvRSS.net)Step 3: Open up Miro, and go to the Channels menu, and select Add Channel. The RSS address that was copied previously should already be displayed. If it's not, paste it.
Screenshot of Miro media player
(Credit: Miro)Miro should now automatically download the latest episode of that show, which it will continue to do every time a new episode appears online.
Screenshot of Miro media player
(Credit: Miro)For ease of use, a user will probably want to rename the channel to something recognizable. This can be done by going to the Channels menu and selecting Rename.
Screenshot of Miro media player
(Credit: Miro)By following these three steps, its possible for a user to wake up to their favorite TV shows already downloaded to their computer, waiting to be watched and without the restrictions of DRM. Users of Apple's iPods will need to re-encode them into Apple's proprietary Quicktime format, while those users with a Linux based Nokia N800 or one of the many low-cost .avi compatible portable media players should be able to transfer the files with little to no additional work.
As I said before, this is all totally illegal under US copyright laws, and most other western countries that have agreed to adopt similar rules. In addition to the standard risks of file sharing, US based users should take special care not to download any leaked pre-broadcast episodes of TV shows, which occasionally show up online. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act passed in 2005 makes mere possession of such media a felony. First time offenders can face up to three years in jail. Caveat emptor.
Christopher Soghoian delves into the areas of security, privacy, technology policy and cyber-law. He is a student fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society , and is a PhD candidate at Indiana University's School of Informatics. His academic work and contact information can be found by visiting www.dubfire.net/chris/. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
broadcasters must provide content to end users.
The point of this law is to force companies to broadcast in digital format by a
certain date, but I wonder if this same law and others could be used in a suit
against NBC because it doesn't not provide content to Apple users who do not
own a TiVo...?
Once the laws catch up to the internet, it will be seen that internet methods
of tv viewing are just as legitimate and already nearly as used as other
methods. At such time, many laws will be passed to "include" the internet in
current FCC laws and regulations.
This is not actually true. The use of PVR software such as MythTV makes it possible to watch TV on your computer or the portable media player of your choice, in a completely legal way. The downside is that it is needlessly difficult to produce such a system which will record and display HD content, due to the HDCP copy protection scheme used to protect HD content.
quicktime program may be proprietary, but ipods can support several video
formats, none of them proprietary to Apple. In fact, the 2 main formats ipods
support, H.264 and MPEG-4, are open standards supported by the vast
majority of video encoding programs, and are commonly used by bit torrent
release groups. One of the most common open source encoding programs,
FFMPEG, supports both of these formats.
The general gist of the article is true, though- the format ipods cannot
support is any sort of DRM protected file that is not sold by Apple, i.e.
anything that NBC sells.
If I could buy an episode online for $2, that would be a great deal. Instead, I'm paying $10 per episode, which is definitely NOT a good deal. Ok, so we'll add in the other show I watch sometimes... call it an additional 3 or four viewings per month. Now I'm paying $5-$6 per episode.
Why not make it easy and inexpensive to buy just the shows you want?
Not a single file will download from tvRSS. A message invariably says the channel is not compatible with Miro. It will attempt to download, but never does. After trying it more than a dozen times with different links at tvRSS, it is now time to uninstall Miro.
At the feedsite, you left click on the show you're interested in. This opens another window. THERE you will find the RSS link to copy.
See the image at http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20070912/Picture_16_540x321.png
And you'll see the that the link you need to copy is highlighted with a box around it.
ADD that link to the CHANNELS in Miro and THAT will grab the feed for you.
It works! I've been grabbing The IT Crowd and Eureka via this method and it works just fine.
I use uTorrent as my BitTorrent client and ShareTV.org for my RSS feed. They also have older shows like Seinfeld, King of Queens, Sex and the City, and others that my girlfriend and I used to watch every once in a while on TBS. Now we have the whole series (that we don't already own on DVD) of our favorite shows on one 500GB external hard drive, all viewable through Vista Media Center.
I cancelled my Charter Cable yesterday, saving me over $80/month. I will miss a lot of NFL games and NCAA football, but I was spending way too much time on the couch anyways!
basically equivalent to AVI in most respects. It's very well documented and
there are a variety of open-source quicktime libraries for working with it.
Quicktime is just a container.
The actual video encoded in the Quicktime file could be saved with a
proprietary codec, but if you've been using iTunes, that "proprietary" codec is
simply MPEG4 -- which is also an international standard (albeit one that's
tortuously long in definition and complex in implementation). Sure, there's a
simple encryption scheme included in the standard that makes it difficult to
access the file without the key, but there's nothing proprietary about it.
If the studios/producers were smart, they would embrace/adapt the bit torrent model and setup official sources of their shows with commercials.
What they don't understand is that prime-time acts as a hard limit on how much TV people can watch. With the convience of download-when-you-want/watch-when-you-want (bittorrent) you end up watching WAY more TV then you ever could. You don't have to ever worry about shows having conflicting time-slots. Or if you find out about a show mid-season, no worries about missed episodes, you can catch up at your own pace. People watching more TV, people seeing more adverts, and being able to keep the copies to watch again means they actually see the adverts more often.
The only issue is that of how to get commercials in, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.If they must, set up a proprietary format (Not DRM mind you) to discourage editing out of commercials. Tweak the system to allow region based insertion of commercials (inserted at download-time, not play-time). People would use this over traditional (unauthorized methods) because it's easier, (faster, don't have to worry about sync issues or bad encodes, don't have to hunt for episodes etc). Will ppl just fastforward commercials? Unlikely, as seeking with digital media has never been that fun of an experience. It's too difficult/time consuming to try and seek past 30-60secs of commercials, most won't bother. But if they must, they can limit the # of keyframes/index points to 60sec intervals.
An official modified analogue of bittorrent is the way to go. People will watch more TV. It's a no brainer. If they don't do it, people will continue to download, but they will receive no ad revenue at all.
Aggies
http://tvfreedom.wordpress.com/
Then just click on the links to subscribe. Oh, and TVRSS works great for me. Maybe you were pasting the wrong link?
1) "Navigate through the list of TV shows on the tvRSS website, and find a desired show."
-->2) **Left-click** on the show's link. <-- Missing step!
3) "[Then] On the web-page for the show, right click..."
Yes, Step 2 is fairly important.
...the link below from someone here works perfectly. Thank you for that.
The link that works [for me] again:
http://tvfreedom.wordpress.com/
is it only downloading that is illegal? I live in europe at the moment as do many other military personal and we don't have access to stream the shows from the broadcast website like abc or the cw. there are other websites that repost these broadcasts so everyone around the world can see them too. Is it wrong to be watching these streams? ( I would not include movies in this because like I said the networks themselves are offering the shows for free in the U.S.) We are U.S. citizens too!!! But I really don't want to do something wrong - so streaming instead of downloading???
Does someone have a legal reference?
Thanks!!!
Although the GB is large, watching a large amount of TV becomes more expensive than a cable TV subscription.
Even if you have unlimited broadband plans, they typically come at a cost, with traffic shaping effectively a cap in itself.
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by GregTV
November 1, 2008 1:32 AM PDT
- http://gregtvhomeentertainment.blogspot.com/
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