Time.com has an article about people that are swapping episodes of their favorite TV-series. Watch this: after music sharing, movie sharing this is the next thing the American Entertainment Industry can focus on.
Using simple software, inexpensive hardware and a fast internet connection people share episodes of all populair tv-shows like Simpons, Futurama, Friends, Sex in the City etc. And of course the place to find it is the FastTrack Network (KaZaA, Morpheus, Grokster):
While the legal battles drag out in court, pirates are enjoying a virtual free-for-all. Necratog (who asked to be identified by his screen name only) is the first link in a chain that supplies digitized copies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to an online chat room and a website that get as many as 1,500 downloads a week. Not to be confused with the many "leechers" (people who only download shows), he's a "capper" (someone who captures a TV show, digitizes it and sends it out to others). |
His PC is connected to a TV cable; an inexpensive video card allows him to watch TV on his monitor. Using a free application called VirtualDub, he digitizes any show he wants and saves it to his hard drive. He then spends about five minutes editing out the commercials and an hour compressing the file until it is small enough to swap online. Then he uploads it to a friend who makes it available for others to download.
Like many other TV freaks, Necratog, 21, also downloads favorite programs and burns them onto CDs. His archives include 400 CDs that hold more than a thousand Buffy, Babylon 5, South Park and Star Trek shows. But Buffy is his favorite. "I'll watch the same episode three or four times in a row," he says. "I've watched some over 20 times altogether."
This is an intresting article on Time.com that is a good read. I also think this is for example something widely used by people in other continents that haven't seen the episodes that are already shown in the US.
Source: Time.com
