MPAA Sues More TV Torrent Sites > Obviously, there is a demand for this....

Obviously, there is a demand for this....

Yes, but I have not yet seen sites that offer legal TV show downloads, only movies.

I want TV shows such as Stargate SG1, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica (the new series), The West Wing, etc.
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WedgeAntilles250

Tom's Rant

reply to trparky
Exactly. My whole point to downloading TV shows is that there are many more options when watching TV nowadays. Gone are the days of the major networks where everyone essentially watched the same thing. And before, there were so few cable shows that the majority of people still watched the major broadcasters for most of their TV viewing. And so it was easy to find a friend or coworker that taped something you might have missed.

Recently, I had to get the entire season of Gilmore Girls for my wife. Well, I couldn't seem to get either episode 15 or 16. I can't recall which. Some URLopen error. Anyways... She was able to get completely caught up and now is a drone that ensures that she is home by 7 PM so she can watch it as it airs. No commercial skipping. Just glued to the TV absorbing every single commercial.

If they want to make money off of DVD sales then start putting the DVDs out before the next season starts. But they are less likely to do THAT (despite the fact that getting caught up before the new season starts would increase viewership) because they are putting them through reruns.
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Note : The statements made by myself are my own and not the opinions of my employer or of my coworkers. 15.81 GHz Crunching Power | The Ryan Foundation for MPS Children

reply to trparky
Hollywoood is stupid, Hmmm people like to download shows and watch them..Lets stop them!!!!. Let see maybe if they made these show available over the internet, or VOD, entire seasons of show people would watch them, and get more adverstising dollars ? ?

Hollywood MPAA *aa are all stupid and deserve to loose money. They keep attacking all forms of revenue.

Yeah, that's one of the things that bug me about VOD systems on cable is that you have a limited # of shows you can see ~50 and after a while (~month) they remove the old shows and put up new ones. As I see it, they should make available every show known to man kind up there! Heck, even charge a quarter to see the old shows and make a profit!

reply to trparky
HBO and Showtime on demand are "free" with subscription to their respective premium channels so there is a kind of pay for play going on there.

I for one wouldn't mind paying the networks a monthly fee for at least the same access to their primetime shows that the premium channels give via VOD.

I really enjoyed the premiums on VOD when I had the Digipic 4000 package with Time Warner cable, and it's really the only thing I miss since I switched to SBC|DISH.

reply to trparky
I don't know if i'd pay 2.50 for a tv show. Say you're favorite tv show has a 22 ep season. I find 55 dollars is ok for a physical dvd box set, but not for downloadable xvids.

I'd be cool with 99 cents though. I guess its the same way with buying albums in itunes. Its pretty much the same price online, as it is to buy the actual cd in the store (unless you only want select tracks).

but yah I think it'd be cool, they could even set it up to leave the commercials in.... maybe cablevision will finally become obscelete as well.

reply to macmouse
While the cost of hard drive space continues to come down, do a back of the envelope calculation and imagine what it would cost to build a video server to hold ALL shows. Oh wait, you said EVERY AVAILABLE SHOW and then sell a view of each of them for only 25 cents.

I use to run the technology for a cable system, and the costs involved in running VOD is very expensive. This is not just a big set of hard drives on some computer people, but VERY fast servers that can STREAM video on demand to thousands upon thousands of people all at the same time. If you are not clear on the concept, take your 4 GHz Pentium IV with the best and fastest hard drives you can get, and see how many video streams you can send over a network until it bogs down and makes them all bad.

Use your head people. A great idea, sure, but the costs involved in building, running, powering and maintaining such a system, NOT to mention the cost of filling it with content (no, they would not simply get the same caps you get on torrents) would be prohibitive. Why do you think PPV and VOD is $4? Not just greed, but the cost of running such a system is expensive, and there is little profit in it for the cable operator. The reason the do it is to make their system different and better than the competitors (like satellite) so they keep the subscriber.

Sure, I could build a system for a cabel company, but I would venture a guess that a show would have to cost more like $2 an episode to make it worth the company's time and effort.

reply to Aggie Dan
You can buy the entire season of Gilmore Girls, 24, The Sheild, Buffy, Angel, etc., etc. @ Sams Club right now for $16.99 to $19.99. Specifically Gilmore Girls was $19.99 @ my local Sams Club (La).

reply to trparky
what's the sense in buying the show for 2.50 when it could be recorded?

I only download the shows that I want to watch, because they show at the same time, of course on different channels.

I don't record because I don't have VHS, my DVD player won't record, and I'm using cable so the quality of the pictures aren't as good, and my tv tuner card for my PC gives a bad high freq. pitch (sucks).

reply to Duh
VoD would be a good way to go, would it need to be presented in the same way you are, no... just use something similar to BitTorrent, and stream the videos... the company would save tons of bandwidth, and resolve a lot of issues of video streaming... I last saw that there was a BitTorrent client that would allow the shows to stream as you downloaded it.