Net pirates nab TV episodes from the sky
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
May 24, 2001, 10:20 a.m. PT
The open deserts of Nevada are perfect for double-wide trailers,
10-foot satellite
dishes--and getting tomorrow's TV shows today.
For years, a dwindling crowd of tech-savvy satellite TV
subscribers has had the ability to
tap freely into the satellite streams meant for affiliate TV
stations, seeing shows such as
"Star Trek: Voyager" or "The Simpsons" days before the rest of the
country. The TV
networks have done little to stop this because few people were
affected.
But now these "pre-air" shows have started appearing on the
Internet and are being traded
like songs were in the early days of MP3 music--a practice known
as TVRip.
A few high-profile shows
have been released in the
last few days, most notably
Wednesday's last-ever
episode of UPN's "Star
Trek: Voyager" and the
season finales of NBC's
"Frasier" and Fox's "The
Simpsons." CNET
News.com was able to
download "Frasier" on
Tuesday several hours
before it aired on television
on the East Coast, for
example.
The budding piracy scene is
hardly likely to start a landslide on the scale of MP3 and
file-swapping service
Napster--the shows are hard to find without some knowledge of the
underground trading
scene and require a fast connection to download. But the issue
marks another chink in the
entertainment industry's armor as it tries to retain tight control
of its content in the wilds of
the Internet.
"The TVRip scene is in its infancy right now," said one trader of
TV, who asked to remain
anonymous. "But it's growing in both quality and quantity in terms
of shows and viewers."
In the Net's underground of software, music and video trading,
it's difficult to tell with
certainty where a given file originated. Files are distributed by
loosely affiliated groups with
names like "Exodus," "iMATiON," and "FE," which provide
rudimentary information about
a given piece of copied software or video but not enough details
to expose themselves or
their own sources.
Groups such as these have been distributing games, music, software
and movies for years,
long before the advent of easy-to-use services such as Napster and
Gnutella. Instead, they
have used the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network as a kind of
digital swap meet, or have
set up drop points across public and private FTP (File Transfer
Protocol) networks around
the Net.
Although these groups have distributed DVD movies and TV shows for
some time, the
pre-release of TV shows a day or two before their airdate is a
fairly recent phenomenon.
Catch it if you can
According to some of those in the TVRip community, these pre-air
shows are taken from
the satellite feeds that networks use to distribute shows to their
affiliates. This practice, in
some cases known as "backhaul" feeds in the TV industry or "wild
feeds" on the Net, has
been going on for years, with a small online community dedicated
to tracking them.
They're not easy to find. There is no permanent schedule or
official instructions to track
them, although it's not illegal to watch them if you can find
them. But it takes an
old-fashioned satellite dish, dubbed a "Big Ugly Dish" or BUD by
online aficionados, and
the technical knowledge to be able to point the dish at precisely
the right place in the sky to
receive the feed.
There aren't many left, at least in the United States, with the
ability to do this. According to
The Carmel Group, a research firm that tracks the satellite
business, subscribers to these
old-fashioned satellite services have fallen from 3.5 million
people in 1994 to just 800,000
people today, their ranks decimated by defection to the simpler,
pizza box-sized dishes
used by services such as DirecTV or EchoStar Communications.
"These are the loyalists to satellite," said Sean Badding, a
Carmel Group analyst. "These
are the really big dishes and the people who have been around
satellite for years."
The wild feeds, which are unscheduled satellite events, have
sparked controversy before.
In addition to scheduled shows such as "The Simpsons" or
"Frasier," the satellites
sometimes carry unedited footage of news programs before the show
goes officially on-air.
In 1996, NBC cracked down on one person who planned to show
footage he had
captured on a public-access TV station, including clips of Tom
Brokaw criticizing rival
anchor Dan Rather.
Under federal law today, it is illegal to retransmit satellite
signals. And that's where the
broadcasters say the TVRip scene is stepping into dangerous
territory.
"We are aware of this, and are monitoring it," said a spokesman
for the National
Association of Broadcasters.
How illegal is it?
Even in the underground community, the distribution of TV shows is
somewhat
controversial. Most of these are shows that can be watched for
free, as opposed to the
DVDs or video games that are a more usual stock in trade. The file
sizes are huge--a
half-hour episode of "Frasier" took up 230MB and an hour to
download over a DSL
(digital subscriber line) connection. Some file-traders charge
that they're not worth their
weight in file size and bandwidth.
Defenders say that there is demand for the shows among college
students and those
without VCRs or the time to program them, however. And the
pre-release shows in
particular mark more of the same kind of challenge that has driven
the copyright pirates
since the Net's early days.
Watchers say they don't worry about any harm to the broadcast
industry, since the shows
are free in the first place and have such a short shelf life.
"The only negative effects this could have on the broadcasting
industry that I can see is that
those viewers wouldn't watch the episodes on TV and not get
exposed to the commercials
which power the episodes," said the anonymous trader. "And
secondly, and probably the
most important to the viewer, (plot) spoilers could be released."
http://cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6030033.html?tag=tp_pr
