This is hands down, the most ridiculous NPR interview I’ve heard in a really long time. Essentially a reporter tries to live a week without watching television and just living off of the web.
[H]ow hard work TV could become.
I was about to say that in a world of legal media (i.e., the iTunes Store and streaming television shows from ABC, Fox and NBC) watching television without a tv is ridiculously easy. All you have to do is a wait a couple of hours after the show ends and there you go.
But if you think about it, torrents still trump everything else. Go to any torrent site and you can watch anything you want. It trumps on-demand with respect to options and portability and it trumps streaming video because it is a more democratic institution than anything else the corporate world can think of. For example, while I was in China I wanted to watch “I, Claudius” because of all the good things I had heard of and there’s no way that I could find that show from the 1970s on a television station website or through the iTunes Store. But there are people who love I, Claudius and post up torrents. Even better, there are other people like me who want to watch it and then P2P networks take care of the rest. We seed it and allow for others to watch.
We, the users and viewers, get to choose what we want to watch and our voice matters. I would even dare to say that that makes us smarter consumers than those stuck with prime time television and the reality TV crap that the networks stuff down our throats. I’d really like to look at some of the statistics and see what the torrent viewing stats are like relative to the networks. I’d bet all the money in my wallet that we watch more intelligent television than most.
If Matt Creamer’s issue is the fact that he has to wait a couple of hours after the show, then his issue is patience and I respect that, but I think that this interview makes torrents out to be a slow and archaic system relative to television. I still see the concept of torrents and those forums as what the media should be striving for, a system and infrastructure that allows more participation from the users in order to invest into the system and get more out of it as a result.