How To Download All Of Your Favorite Shows Effortlessly And Watch Them Anywhere | Hacker News Reader

How To Download All Of Your Favorite Shows Effortlessly And Watch Them Anywhere

mattmaroon.com

25 pointstwampss21 comments

I wonder, how much in dollar value are the ads in one episode of scrubs. It seems like the TV networks could use something like this technology and just charge a per-episode rate of (X * 1.5).

Based on some back of the envelope using the superbowl ($3 million / (30 second spot * 100 million viewers) = $0.03 per viewer commercial * 36 commercials per hour = $1.08. That's probably an upper bound since super bowl ads have a good chance of making the news outlets, talk shows, etc.

So would you pay $1.50 an episode to watch commercial free your favorite show whenever you want? For Firefly yeah, but I'm not so sure about The View.

Then again my implicit wage rate is $0.03 * 120 = $3.60 an hour so I'm willing to earn $3.60 an hour watching television ads but only if I get Joss Whedon unpaid breaks.

I don't know about the Superbowl being an upper bound. You generally pay less for things when you buy them in volume. I'd imagine the per person rate on a normal show (especially one with great demos, like The Daily Show) might be higher.

That said, you can just buy many of them via iTunes. It's clear that adoption there is very small, but it's not clear why. It could be the price. It could be that you can't stream it to an Xbox or any similar product that anyone actually owns. (My guess is the 8 people who bought an Apple TV probably buy some shows this way.)

Also cable with DVR would pay for itself fast if you watch a lot of shows. I don't though, so at $1.50 per I'd still save money over the course of a year. On the other hand, given that the distribution cost is $0 via bittorrent, I would think the networks would take 1x or maybe even less. I highly doubt they're getting $1 per view on Hulu for instance.

That may be the common-sense but from my experience in the advertising world it is not the case. Costs are always paid in CPM.

The Superbowl drives a huge premium because you can get such breadth and volume. Niches on TV tend to be cheaper (by CPM).

Isn't breadth and volume bad for CPM? With the Super Bowl, you're effectively advertising to everyone in America, so your demographics are almost exactly average, whereas with The Daily Show it's largely college educated 18-35 year olds, the most coveted demo.

I'd imagine the Super Bowl has to have way lower eCPM.

Not for branding - which all Super Bowl ads are. You want to get as many unique viewers as possible, demos aren't overly important. Branding by buying up a whole bunch of separate channels and time slots is very difficult to get that kind of unique impressions.

The Daily Show's demo is very coveted so they would get a much better rate than a Simpsons rerun earlier in the day.

I will look for the TV study, I am going from a foggy memory.

However, even online breadth and volume is very key for branding campaigns. That is how ads.com really took off - being a single point of purchase for a massive number of uniques sold well with the traditional ad agencies (because they are lazy/uninformed when it comes to the web).

(Only get the ones that are legal for you to download of course.)

Heh. I get the impression that most media creators are not voluntarily sharing their content in HD/commercial-free via Bittorrent RSS.

Exactly, which is what things like Slingbox are good for. Even though media creators probably fear that too.

Who ever is voting this up: Go away.

Seriously, not directed at matt maroon for posting this on his own blog, but I assume most people here have heard of bittorrent and rss before. This isn't new, worthy of discussion, or even vaguely interesting to hackers.

Seems to me that the article would go over great on digg/reddit, maybe you should try there.

A few of my friends who use this site were surprised when I told them how it works. I bet you'd be surprised how many people here use both technologies separately but not together.

But, I could see it being off-topic here too. Not entirely shocked or offended that it was killed.

There are a lot of things like that, which wouldn't get voted up. Obviously, the real pull is its edginess.

People like myself and parent aren't keen on that kind of pull b/c it attracts the "hackers" who think breaking systems is hacking. They tend to be narcissistic and more a drain than a contribution.

For Mac OS X you can use TVShows for that: http://tvshows.sourceforge.net/index2.html

If only there were some good shows to download...

I liked Heroes but this season is whack. I like the UK Office, Extras, Family Guy, Survivorman. I usually watch the Daily Show/Colbert but don't want to bother downloading those.

Any recommendations?

30 Rock

I'd like to add ... How to watch all your downloaded shows on your TV:

1. Get a DVD player with Divx playback support (I have a $50 one from costco that also includes a usb port) 2. Convert your downloaded file to Divx using ffmpegx on a Mac http://www.ffmpegx.com/ 3. Burn converted file to a blank DVD or copy to USB memory stick 4. Enjoy

Kind of a pain to do on a regular basis, but would definitely work.

I find that it it easier to use an RSS feed for all torrents from a (medium-volume) site at once and filter it locally.

I somehow couldn't get filters working well. I was trying on Mininova though which may have been the problem. It was before I discovered tvrss.

There are tutorials http://www.utorrent.com/rsstutorial.php

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgsf923m_2d6k97n

They work for Mininova's feeds.

I have a low opinion of pirates, and an ever lower opinion of lazy pirates.

I wasn't expecting this article from Matt, otherwise it doesn't belong here at HN.

I would kill for some Jeopardy torrents.

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