TV Wars: BitTorrent to the Rescue
Written by enigmax on March 01, 2007Millions of UK viewers who have already paid for access to shows such as Lost, 24 and Battlestar Galactica are now facing blank television screens because of a dispute between Virgin Media and BSkyB. They now face a stark choice: miss the shows they love so much, or download them via BitTorrent.
An epic battle between Virgin Media and rival BSkyB , fought out in full-page newspaper ads, appears to have ended in deadlock. As a result, BSkyB has pulled the plug on several channels it supplies to Virgin for its cable TV customers, leaving millions stranded in the middle of current runs of Lost, 24 and Battlestar Galactica. And the sad thing is, many customers paid in advance for a service they wont get.
They are now greeted with this disappointing message when they turn their receiver to Sky One:
Thanks to Sky, some of the non-premium Sky channels, like Sky One and Sky News are no longer available. They’ve picked up their ball and gone home. We believe that Sky want to limit your choice and force consumers into switching service.
Indeed, the only hope for Virgin subscribers to see these programs is to take out a second subscription with arch-rival BSkyB. Or they could do it Pirate style, power up their BitTorrent client and visit a BitTorrent site, where they’re absolutely spoilt for choice.
A search on the popular BitTorrent site Mininova returns 642 hits for ‘Battlestar Galactica’, 1106 hits for Lost and 612 hits for ‘24′. That means every single show that has aired in the United States (and the UK always gets its shows much later on, so is currently way behind) is now available for the Virgin Media customer with an internet connection, regardless of the disputes in their suppliers’ boardroom.
And UK TV addicts are not new to downloading TV shows. According to Envisional research, in 2005 some 18% of all TV show downloaders were in the UK and it warned “In effect, the Internet is now a global video recorder, perhaps more accurately, a free global PVR or Tivo. It has brought immense power to the individual TV viewer, but immense problems for the television industry.” In this case the reverse is true, the problems have been caused by the TV industry and will likely be sorted out by the tech-savvy with the aid of a BitTorrent client.
Arrr!
Previously: Bizarre Virus Threatens to Kill File-Sharers
Next: TorrentPod Episode 27
14 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
poor richard branson =[
That’ll teach them to rely on an arch rival for content.
In the future, I see the TV becoming the internet or it will die!
Or it will just be a local thing.
I stopped watching TV about 2 years ago.
I do watch shows on the computer streaming.
I can see why Sky pulled the plug. They asked for a renewed contract and they could aggree on terms. Vergin should have argued harder if they wanted to keep the contract.
No, Sky wanted double what virgin were paying before. Anyway Virgin owns the UKTV channel network, which shows repeats of many shows including Old series Battlestar Galactica and Top Gear. If Virgin wanted they could pull the plug on UKTV for sky viewers.
Virgin do not own UKTV - they produce for it. UKTV is owned mostly by the BBC.
The other owner of UKTV is Flextec.
See http://www.londonfreelance.org/rates/owners/_uktv.html
… and to be finally clear. Flextec is a production arm that once belonged to Telewest, then NTL, then partly by Virgin. However, they remain purely a production arm and has no executive power to take UKTV away from other distributers. Hope that is clear.
I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting!
I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links:
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