TVShows, the handy TV-downloading application for Mac users, is no more.
We first covered the application in early 2007, and in the years that followed it gathered a healthy user base.
However, the developers decided to quit, for a quite unusual reason; they don’t want people to pirate anymore.
Below is an excerpt of the farewell message from the TVShows coders.
“At first, as you can probably can see, the application seemed harmless and it was a perfect match for our situation. But something changed on September 1, 2010, that has bothered us ever since: Apple had suddenly started releasing 99¢ ad-free TV show rentals. It wasn’t for all shows but it was a start and it was a great one. We could finally legally rent episodes at a price that wouldn’t break our piggy banks.”
“Over the next few months we found ourselves employed and started renting episodes of the shows we missed on TV. In the background, Ember Code began to take a much more legitimate spin and we started producing applications that stopped infringing on the content of other providers. The more we coded on these projects the happier we became and the more we started to dislike spending so much of our time supporting a free application that could potentially hurt other content providers and endager our own futures. It was time to end the development of TVShows.”
“We know a lot of people enjoyed the application, and unfortunately some still won’t be able—or want—to rent episodes from Apple. We understand that not all episodes are rentable yet, and we also know that there will always be piracy of TV show episodes using plenty of other applications that perform the same role TVShows did. We also realize that we won’t be persuading anyone to start paying for episodes they’re already used to pirating, just like no one can persuade us to change our minds about something we feel so strongly about. But we can’t remain part of a scene that we no longer support—a scene that could potentially endanger our own futures and others.”
