Every generation has its perks, and with the Internet, the MTV and Culture Wars generations as they’re commonly referred to, has the almost untapped downloading of media via the Internet. In relation to television and films, since the 90’s there has been an unfound number of illegal downloads through peer to peer servers and torrent based clients.
A peer to peer works something like this, an individual will hold a file, lets say it’s a screener to a film that has yet to be released. They then rip this to an audio visual file or something similar on their computer and put it into their file sharing folder. They may use a client such as Kazaa or Limewire. Only when they are online and someone using the same client is searching for the specific file that they have, can someone else download it directly from this other person, as long as they are online and have an open connection. If you or that person (known as peers) get disconnected from the Internet the connection will fail and you will only be able to continue downloading when you re-establish the connection. Download speeds depends on a various number of things such as Internet connections, Firewalls and other obstacles. But nonetheless it is peer to peer and the examples I have given is one of an illegal upload and download as screeners are intended only for the person it is given to watch and review.
A torrent based client is slightly different. Once again someone would have to gain access to a file and then create a torrent of this file. This is like a small packet of information about the bigger file, how it is constructed and where it should be constructed etc. For this you will need a Bit Torrent Client such as Bitlord or ABC. Finding a torrent is slightly different to searching on a peer to peer network as torrents are catalogued on individual websites such as Pirate Bay, Torrent Spy and Mininova. Here you put in the key words and search for a healthy file. A file deemed healthy will be one with many people downloading it and many people acting as seeders (hosting the main file). Once this has been found, the torrent is downloaded and then opened in the torrent client which then uses the information in the torrent to establish a connection and start filtering through and rebuilding the image of the visual file on your computer. The main difference between this and peer to peer is that here, instead of downloading from one individual you are downloading as part of a chain of people who are all downloading the same file as you are.
Both methods are generally used for transfer of large files and as a result have been used to share both films and television shows. Films may be ripped from DVD screeners or releases while TV shows are generally captured using a TV capture card. What evidently happens is that an online audience is built up whom instead of waiting for a US show to appear on the UK shores, download TV shows such as Lost and the latest show to hit BBC entitled Heroes as it is screened in the
US.
The benefits of this, although arguably illegal, are that the files are of high quality, they are on your computer to view as and when convenient and can be watched over and over again and of course can be watched sometimes months before they are actually televised. Another benefit of this method is when you’ve missed an episode of something, especially if it’s popular, you may go and download it, or if you want to see an old series of something, again you can probably find someone or a group of people who have it. You also watch the programmes at your own convenience.
This notion of time shifting isn’t a new one what with video recorders being around for more then twenty years now. But the Internet itself has opened up a whole host of problems where piracy is concerned and one that is thus far proving difficult to police. The whole file sharing phenomena has allowed audiences to grow and to share more easily television shows and films alike, but is the download via peer2peer or torrent based the way forward?. Surely you would make more hits from screening on the Internet then allowing to freely download and share video files? This one is debateable and one which will have to be considered as a method of opening up and developing a networked audience.
