It’s Sascha Herzig’s Friday morning ritual. After rousing himself from slumber, the junior finance major goes online to download the previous night’s episode of ‘The O.C.’

‘I have night classes when it airs, so I want to catch up on the last episode,’ Herzig said. ‘It’s high-def, widescreen. I’ve got a good LCD monitor so the quality is amazing.’

Herzig is not alone in his habit-about 18 percent of ResNET’s download traffic is used by BitTorrent, said Lee Badman, network engineer for Computing and Media Services.

‘We have to slow it down a little bit; if (BitTorrent) were unthrottled, there would be no room for http or e-mail,’ Badman said.

Continuing the line of Napster, AudioGalaxy, Morpheous and KaZaA, BitTorrent has become a predominant peer to peer program. Where its predecessors were havens for music, software and movies, recent television shows never took hold. TV, however, has become BitTorrent’s forte. Hits like ’24,’ ‘South Park’ and ‘Lost’ fly around the world literally minutes after they finish airing (and sometimes before).

One may think television networks would be shaking in their shoes.

If only they knew about it.

‘Wait, these are network TV shows?’ asked Ed Harrison, director of CBS press information. ‘Like ‘CSI’?’

Yes, just like ‘CSI,’ available in the original, New York and Miami versions right now on sites like btefnet.net or tvtorrents.com, major portals for BitTorrent TV shows.

And after consulting others at the network, CBS Vice President David Katz refused to comment on any plans to combat or monitor BitTorrent use, citing ‘sensitive legal issues’ surrounding the technology.

The strategy employed by the networks thus far has been to remain quiet. Bob Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television, notes the backlash that companies like Apple have suffered when aggressively pursuing those who may have infringed on their intellectual property rights.

‘They risk looking like the big bad evil corporation for suing the poor guy who just wants to download an episode of ‘Jake and the Fatman,” Thompson said.

Badman notes that those very episodes have been coming through SU’s ResNET at greater and greater volumes. In the last six months, BitTorrent has overtaken KaZaA and Gnutella as the top file-sharing program on campus, with gains every week.

‘When (BitTorrent) first came out we thought it was just another p2p,’ he said. ‘Then you take another look and it’s just out there in the wild: full movies, TV shows, games … ‘

There have been times when five to 10 users of ResNET were using 80 percent of the network to download shows, movies and applications. But Badman said CMS keeps no records whatsoever on what people download or upload to the network.

‘Who’s doing what, we could care less as long as they’re not chocking the network,’ he said.

However, companies like BayTSP do care about users’ Internet activity. The company monitors file-sharing protocols for TV networks, producers and other media companies.

BayTSP Spokesman Jim Graham said the firm monitors 3.5 to 5 million infringements per day.

‘TV shows are definitely the hottest growth area for p2p,’ he said.

BayTSP traces the IP addresses of violators to their Internet service providers and sends a notice of illegal activity. Graham said his company alone sends about a million of these notices per month.

Badman said CMS had received some of these notices, at which point the student who possessed the IP in question was referred to judicial affairs.

‘The ResNET environment is pretty much the Wild West,’ he said.

The legal alternative

Currently, there is no legal way offered by the networks to download these shows; nothing in the same vein as the iTunes music store.

‘The networks are certainly capable of cluelessness,’ Thompson said. ‘For the last 30 years they’ve missed the boat plenty of times.’ Thompson believes the networks are working on a legal method to download shows, but doesn’t expect to see it for another several years.

According to Jorge Gonzalez, co-founder of Zeropaid.com, a file-sharing portal, Fox is leading other networks in developing a legal alternative, but there’s been no public result yet.

Scott Grogan, vice president of corporate communications for Fox Television, refused to comment on the network’s plans saying, ‘If we were working on something, we certainly wouldn’t tell the Syracuse (Daily) Orange.’

Katie O’Connell, a vice president of Imagine Television, which produces one of the most pirated shows, ’24,’ said she would welcome a legal solution to TV piracy.

‘The technology exists for music, it’d be a great idea for television,’ she said.

O’Connell said such a service may be delayed because of the complex ownership and rights to different shows between writers’ guilds, directors’ guilds, producers, networks, DVD distributors and syndicates. The biggest hang-up is probably not the technology, but trying to decide how to divide up the pieces of the revenue stream, she said.

Herzig said he would happily pay for his weekly dose of ‘The O.C.’ instead of downloading it, adding that a legal service would be quicker and more efficient.

Thompson cites the explosion of the television DVD market as a chief impediment to online distribution of TV shows.

‘It speaks to the uncanny ability of the American consumer to buy packaging,’ he said.

While ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Law & Order’ are on multiple times a day on numerous channels, fans buy full-season DVDs that can range in price anywhere from $30 to more than $100. A system where users could download shows to their computers and watch them whenever they wanted might jeopardize the massive profits that DVDs have yielded for TV producers.

‘Box sets are a growing revenue stream for the network, so they need to manage the pirated material out there,’ Graham said. ‘In the movie industry you’re seeing they’re exploring legal ways to download movies.’

After fighting an aggressive anti-piracy campaign, movie studios are attempting to roll out services like CinemaNow, which allows subscribers to stream movies on to their computer for about $4. However, such services have struggled.

‘You can pay CinemaNow, but the selection stinks,’ Gonzalez said. ‘It’s no surprise that users migrate to p2p networks to get the content they want. If content was available for a reasonable price with easy access, I believe it would be successful.’

The technology factor

TV was never able to gain a foothold on KaZaA because the design prevented the quick passing of large files. Users looking to download a ‘Simpsons’ episode could probably find one from a few years ago, but those searching for last night’s would be out of luck. The problem is that, on these older networks, a user must complete downloading a file before beginning to share it with others. This results in massive and slow-moving queues for popular files. The more people who try to download that ‘Simpsons’ episode, the longer it will take to get.

BitTorrent works in reverse; the higher the demand on a file, the easier it is to obtain. Before transfer, a file is sliced up into thousands of tiny pieces. As soon as a user completes downloading just one of these pieces, it can be passed on to other users, and users can exchange pieces-the process is entirely nonlinear.

Graham of BayTSP said his company is only identifying individuals who are making the shows available to others by uploading them. But the design of BitTorrent means users must upload a file if they wish to download it-it’s impossible to freeload. So unlike KaZaA where users could leech on others by downloading but not sharing files with the network, thus protecting themselves from legal action, BitTorrent exposes everyone to legal consequences.

Patrick Tsao, a sophomore computer art major, said he occasionally downloads TV shows, but isn’t particularly worried about the repercussions of legal action.

‘I’m a poor college boy, for God sakes,’ he said. ‘I gotta make do.’

Unlike KaZaA, which is an all-in-one file search and download program, BitTorrent just sets the user up with a connection for that one particular file. Small Torrent files, which reference other users who have the TV show in question, are downloaded from the Internet. Once launched on the user’s computer, the Torrent connects to a tracking server, which allows the pieces of the program to begin downloading.

‘Where KaZaA is a universe with many stars, BitTorrent is just a single star, one piece of content,’ said John Borland, a writer for CNET News.com, a technology news Web site.

While other programs like eDonkey have incorporated incremental downloading into their networks, they expose themselves to spoofing, where fake files pollute the network. This explains the piercing crackling noise in a song file claiming to be the latest Ben Folds single. Torrent files, however, are usually posted on a single Web site where they can be verified.

‘Of course it makes it easier to shut down (with lawsuits) because there’s a central server,’ Borland said.

Gonzalez said he expects the same technological patterns to continue. New programs will emerge, but content producers won’t respond in any meaningful way.

‘These executives are so out of touch,’ he said, ‘they have no idea how the Internet works.’

Published on April 12, 2005 at 12:00 pm