24 is traditionally one of the hit shows on BitTorrent. Together with Heroes, Lost and Prison Break, every episode is downloaded well over a million times. The show also has a reputation of leaking out, just before it premieres.

Similar to the unscheduled appearance of season 6, the first four episodes of the new season were uploaded onto several BitTorrent sites earlier today. The source appears to be a promo DVD sent out by the studios to several media outlets, TV editors and reviewers. According to early reports, the quality of the rip is mediocre, unlike the usual high quality scene rips usually posted on BitTorrent. Indeed, the leak appears to have bypassed The Scene altogether, leaking to P2P networks first.

It is often suggested that these leaks might be intentional, that broadcasters use them to hype the show just before the season starts. Although this is often impossible to confirm, it would not be the first time that this has happened.

In 2007, a Warner Bros executive admitted that he helped to leak the pilot of ‘Pushing Daisies’. The exec wanted to make sure the show “got out there,” and said his goal was to “help the cause.” He didn’t upload it himself though, but used his neighbor’s kid to do it instead.

The leak of these 24 episodes, whether intentional or not, is guaranteed to result in a surge of word of mouth promotion, and free promotion throughout the blogosphere. If anything it will help the show, rather than hurt it.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Rather than manually trawling many torrent sites hunting for material, most will agree it’s much more convenient for the content to come to the user, especially when it’s possible to take advantage of the RSS feature built into many BitTorrent clients.

TVNanny is a site dedicated to indexing various torrent sites around the world and bringing the latest in TV torrents to its users, as quickly as possible after they appear on the web.

It’s easy to sign up to TVNanny. Simply enter a username and a password along with an email address (no validation required) and registration is complete.

Clicking on the ‘Shows’ button reveals a fairly comprehensive list of TV shows, currently numbering nearly 200. Popular shows are highlighted, as are shows which have new episodes freshly indexed during the previous 24 hours. Clicking on any show name displays a page giving some detail about the plot, the actors involved and other useful information. More comprehensive reading material is made easily available by the TV.com link provided at the bottom of each page.

Once the ‘Subscribe’ button is clicked, the ’subscriptions’ page appears where it’s possible to indicate the season and episode numbers to be monitored, the desired quality (ranging from TVRip to HDTV) and a convenient release name filter. The page supplies the URL of a custom RSS feed tailored to the user’s subscriptions which can be entered into the RSS section of a BitTorrent client such as uTorrent or Azureus, providing automatic downloads as soon as the required episodes are indexed.

In the unlikely event that a certain show doesn’t appear, requests for the indexing of new shows can be made via the ‘Suggest a new show’ button.

For users who operate a client that doesn’t support the downloading of .torrent files via RSS, the TVNanny site provides a standalone piece of software which will work alongside the existing torrent client. Those using a client like uTorrent which already has RSS support can find additional information about the feature on the official uTorrent site.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.