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thankless job of uploading
Tuesday, June 19 2012
One of the things I do on a Tuesday is use Bittorrent to download the copy of The Bachelorette broadcast the night before. Whichever people do the necessary (but thankless) job of uploading crappy reality shows don't typically do it as quickly as the people who upload quality dramas such as Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. I find myself wondering about these uploaders, some of whom apparently pay for premium cable so that thousands of others will not have to. Are they acting out of a sense of altruism? Or is it a fuck you to the man?
Back in the early 1990s when I used to crack Macintosh software, I did so without any reward except the ability to run programs, most of which I had no interest in once I'd cracked them. Software cracking was like solving a puzzle, and the endorphin rush of success was its own reward. But if I'd had the internet in those days I would have wanted to share my victories. By the time I did have the internet, software cracking no longer seemed like fun; somebody else had always beat me to whatever crack needed doing and posted a patch online.
Ripping high definition video streams to .AVI files (wait, aren't DVRs and HDTVs supposed to be designed to prevent this?), stripping out the commercials, and then uploading to a Bittorrent catalog doesn't require anywhere near the same set of skills as software cracking and seems to me as more like grunt work than anything else. But people get satisfaction from it, and it's the reason most business models built around selling media will have to change dramatically as the people who still pay for cable gradually die off.
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