How The Game Is Played

Dr. Who and the BitTorrent of Doom

For anyone not aware of it, BBC Wales has started producing new episodes of Dr. Who again. NOw call me an uber-geek but I was really bummed at the thought that it might take years for them to reach the US.

Enter technology. My helpful considerate co-geeks in the UK have been capturing excellent quality AVIs of the episodes and making them available on BitTorrent.

For anyone not familiar with BitTorrent, it's a true distributed peer-to-peer file sharing network. In return for getting access to files you also become a server at the same time and help others receive the files. Its all controlled by index-files called .torrent files. The .torrent files for all the Dr. Who episodes have been appearing on ww.TorrentSpy.com and the result is that I have been able to watch all three of the current new Dr. Whos.

I'd feel slightly guilty about this, as it is no doubt a copyright violation, if (1) they were available any other way in the US and (2) the BBC hadn't actually started it be releasing the first AVI themselves. (The AVIs are so high quality I'm not sure they haven't been releasing all of them, but I have no information on any but the first.)

Which brings up an interesting question. Technologies like BitTorrent are not going to go away. How do you continue to run a media business in an era of such media transportability? FWIW BBC Wales seems to have decided that letting these new Dr. Whos be torrented serves as good advertising for their eventual sale for TV release in this country. It will be interesting to see how that works for them.

On the subject of Media, I just got and watched the director's cuts of Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick. I can see why CoR didn't do well in the theatres. As a sequel its an odd movie. It retains three characters (though recasts two of them) but its a completely different kind of movie. Pitch Black was a low budget action/horror/survival film. CoR is best described as Star Wars meets Conan, with a lavish visual style and sensability. About the only thing it has in common with its predecessor is the Vin Deisel Riddick character, a certai namoutn of action/violence, and a bit of a dark edge.

Nonetheless I found myself very much preferring CoR. My take is that this movie is likely to do an "Alien." It died in the theatres because it wasn't what Pitch Black fans expected and the studio didn't know how to market it. It has all the right ingredients however for a "cult-classic." Strong interesting characters, strong visual sense of style, a plot thats not too hard for just about anyone to follow, and of course the aforementioned edge. I suspect it will see a re-birth over the next few years in DVD release and may even come back to life as a series. (Lets hope if it does its better then the Alien series which became pretty worthless after the second movie.)

As long as I'm talking about movies, I can't leave the subject without mentioning one of the last toys I bought-- a pair of IoMagic 5.1 headphones. They arent the most comfortable headphones I've ever owned, but amazingly they really DO work. They have a cute little vibration they substitute for the rumble of a sub-woofer but outside of that I'd have to say the experience is very movie-theatre-ish. I have found myself preferrentially watching DVDs on my PC just because of the surround sound from these headphones. They also produce decent sounding music. If they had just made the ear pads a bit bigger so they didnt pinch my ears, they'd be about perfect.

Work-wise I'm still in Game Server documentation hell, preparing for a time when we might actually get more hands to help bring this beast to fully implemented status.

Posted at 03:01PM Apr 11, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]