8 karma · joined July 26, 2009
Then again I haven't personally bricked a device in a long time.
I used to have my mother set up with torrents. All her tv shows were downloaded automatically. Often times she would watch it live and then delete the file, but if she missed watching it live then she had that file waiting for her. Also if she wanted a movie or older tv show, then all she had to do was click on a link on her desktop and search the website for what she wanted. Click on the torrent and it would download to the proper folder.
These days it's the same except she clicks on something she wants and it is a nzb file. As well newly aired tv shows download for her automatically. I've noticed she doesn't watch as much live anymore. Though she is using Netflix more often now as well.
Really obscure things. Torrents with such things will have very few seeders/leechers and take a long time to download anyway and never max out bandwidth. With usenet older things were deleted and had to be uploaded again. (Anything older than a few weeks) These days the retention is getting close to three years.
Release times were in favor of torrents. Now the time difference is but a few minutes, some first via a torrent and other via usenet. The fastest of course would be via IRC/FTP.
I spend around $100 a year for usenet access and am unsure the costs of a seedbox. I never have to worry about upload ratio and am not sharing files with anyone else. The primary means of people getting caught for copyright infringement. I also download at the full speed of my connection at all times. Also that connection is encrypted so the ISP can't even see what I am getting. I often get about 500GB a month. I pay about a penny and a half per gigabyte.
One feature that wasn't available to me when I switched was what utorrent had which others may have had as well. RSS downloading of torrents. Was very handy with setting up tv shows and acted very much like a internet tivo. Now I use sabnzbd and sickbeard for such things.
The only thing I still like about torrents is the way it handles errors. It will check the data as it downloads and discard and redownload a section of data needed. With usenet, my client will download all of it and then verify the parts and if there are any errors, it'll auto download the needed par files to repair the damage and then extract the file. Such things aren't needed with a torrent.
One good thing about usenet is that if you have the proper client you can basically stream from it. As the .rar files are downloaded and extracted one by one in order. With torrents parts of the file are downloaded randomly and does not lead it self to be streamed.