4 ms·

I live in Spain. Local TV shows are crap, and cable or tv-over-dsl price & coverage also is. Satellite is dying and DTV (and soon, paid DTV) is taking over. Ri

I live in Spain. Local TV shows are crap, and cable or tv-over-dsl price & coverage also is. Satellite is dying and DTV (and soon, paid DTV) is taking over. Right now, if you want good TV shows (US ones, basically) you have to subscribe to any satellite or cable/tv-over-dsl offer including FOX and AXN. You pay the equal of 80$ a month for watching badly dubbed TV shows, aired a few months after airing in the US. As a bonus, your internet connection is slow when you're watching TV (or recording a tv show with your shiny DVR which is obviously not included in the stupidly expensive setup fee) if you use tv-over-dsl (the most common way to get "premium" tv here). And that's why I download tv shows. I have a Fonera router connected to my home DSL router. The Fonera runs a "patched" system (allows to stream movies through SMB –without asking password– and doesn't hangs the fonera's cpu when loading multiple files at once). When a new episode appears, it's pushed to the transmission server (the fonera runs a webserver and has a RPC service). Transmission downloads the episode, and it's "published" through the LAN network so I can copy it to any computer through WiFi, watch it through the wired LAN network or just watch it from the multimedia hard drive (which has a built-in network interface and a SMB client), sitting on the sofa (and enjoying a pretty good quality!). So, definitely, it's much better to have my favorite TV shows ready to watch at any time (and having them downloading during the night, so my 1,5mbit connection doesn't suffers from it) than paying 80$ each month for what they call "premium tv". That it's not the future, but that doesn't means we have to live in the past, right?

driverdan 17y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that Spanish copyright law allows downloading and sharing of TV shows anyway so long as there's no money involved.
- adrinavarro 17y ago
  You're right. Looks like they want to "regulate" this, but I'm pretty sure that things aren't going to change in the mid term (well, at least in the next 10 years). That's because we're in Spain (and even if things change, "real consequences" will require lot of deeper legal modifications, hard to accomplish). We're lazy, also. (PS: not just TV shows, also movies & music or any other multimedia material. You can't be prosecuted –because of the "secret" in telecommunications which doesn't allows any tracking, as IP addresses are considerate "protected, private data"– and presumption of innocence does the rest (with no real evidence of being you, only you the infractor, there aren't any possibilities here to prosecute a particular).

driverdan 17y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that Spanish copyright law allows downloading and sharing of TV shows anyway so long as there's no money involved.

adrinavarro 17y ago
You're right. Looks like they want to "regulate" this, but I'm pretty sure that things aren't going to change in the mid term (well, at least in the next 10 years). That's because we're in Spain (and even if things change, "real consequences" will require lot of deeper legal modifications, hard to accomplish). We're lazy, also. (PS: not just TV shows, also movies & music or any other multimedia material. You can't be prosecuted –because of the "secret" in telecommunications which doesn't allows any tracking, as IP addresses are considerate "protected, private data"– and presumption of innocence does the rest (with no real evidence of being you, only you the infractor, there aren't any possibilities here to prosecute a particular).