For a couple years now, I've been keeping up to date with American television via a technology called BitTorrent. I can usually have an episode of an hour-long program like 24, House, or Prison Break (my three favs at the moment) downloaded by lunch time the day after they air in the US. But the annoying thing about BitTorrent is that you have to go searching for the torrent files. You can subscribe to RSS feeds of searches on sites like mininova.org or thepiratebay.org, but you still have to keep an eye on them and notice when new torrents are available.
Podcasts, on the other hand, are nice because they get downloaded automatically. You wake up in the morning, open your iTunes, and you have a number of podcasts already downloaded and ready to be played (or copied to your iPod, hence the name). What sucks about podcasts, compared to BitTorrents, is that the content is pretty lame.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could combine the great content of BitTorrent with the automatic downloading of podcasts? Now you can!
I found this page solely because he's linking to me in his deli.cio.us links on his sidebar. Check this out: how-to-subscribe-to-tv-shows-using-the-democracy-player-bittorrent-rss
How to Subscribe to TV Shows Using The Democracy Player & Bittorrent & RSS
Download The Democracy Player
Right click on the RSS/XML icon link and select Copy Link URL
Go to Feedburner, and paste the URL into the text field on the home page, check the “I am a Podcaster!” box, and click next.
- If you don’t already have a Feedburner account, you’ll be prompted to create one
Click “Next” to activate the feed
Copy the URL of the feed provided by Feedburner (it should start with http://feeds.feedburner.com/)
Open The Democracy Player, click “Add Channel”, and paste the URL of the feed into the field that appears
Sleep. In the morning, you should have an episode of The Daily Show to watch!
New episodes will automatically be downloaded as soon as they’re available on Bittorrent – I’ve found this to usually be a day after the show airs
Enjoy!
It really works! I've got my Democracy Player downloading from his recommended The Daily Show feed right now.
I completely agree that this is the future of television. Already DVR devices, like TiVo, allow you to watch shows on your own time. Ever increasing bandwidth will draw more and more people to the internet for their television content. Apple has it right, trying to jump into the paid subscriber market with their Apple TV. They've jumped the major hurdle from the office to the living room sofa.
I'm very happy about this ability to auto-download torrents directly into a video player.
Any illegal activity mentioned in this blog post was strictly hypothetical.