Illegal TV downloads as popular as they are only because the media refuses to deliver


Last night’s penultimate episode of Doctor Who series four didn’t let up on the excitement from the opening teaser to the last second. It was incredible, and how fans outside the UK can avoid spoilers before getting the chance to watch an official broadcast on their own local channels, I’ve no idea—but trust me, if you’re one of them, you should try. It has to be said, though, that fantastic cliffhangers don’t exactly discourage illegal downloads of shows via the likes of BitTorrent, do they? Not when populations are otherwise expected to wait a year or more to see all the fuss for themselves.

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Sunday, June 29th, 2008

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BBC breaks own terms of service with Doctor Who iPlayer gaff


BBC iPlayer broke its own terms of service on Saturday night by making last week’s episode of Doctor Who available for streaming or download for a second time, instead of this week’s episode. Programmes are only meant to be available for one week after broadcast, and appear online within an hour of being broadcast.The wrong episode was, for three hours, listed as available for six more days.

BBC phone lines were engaged for much of those three hours, presumably thanks to irate Who fans. Maybe not, but it wouldn’t be a surprise. Most so-called cult shows attract devoted and activist followings. That’s why they call them ‘cult’. The iPlayer forums certainly started to fill up with questions and gripes and angry missives from people who, like me, missed the actual broadcast of Forest of the Dead, which is the concluding part of a two-parter, the first part having been entitled Silence in the Library, and wanted to use iPlayer exactly how it’s intended to be used, only to find… we couldn’t. It was more than frustrating.

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Sunday, June 8th, 2008

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