Tape It Off The Internet

November 14, 2005 5:10 PM

Tape It Off The Internet started as a joke, but now they want to beat out the flickrs of video and iTunes, with its $1.99 tipping point, in the world of TV show downloads. If they ever actually release the thing, that is.
posted by TunnelArmr (15 comments total)

3… 2… 1…
posted by ijoshua at 5:20 PM on November 14, 2005

When Web 2.0 goes bad. Tonight at 11.
posted by dvdgee at 5:27 PM on November 14, 2005

Can't wait till Web 2.0 SP1 comes out - it'll be super sweet
posted by marlowe at 5:43 PM on November 14, 2005

when people stop using 60 some odd percent of the net for torrent swapping...then i will wonder about spending two bucks for what i could have seen for free the night before...
posted by stilgar at 6:05 PM on November 14, 2005

I can't see how this website is going to be anything more than a fancy looking index of torrent files (please correct me if I'm wrong). Looks good though. Making it social is a neat idea too. Will probably introduce a lot of mainstream Internet users to P2P (BitTorrent?), I guess. I'm still puzzled, however, as to how they're going to do all of what they're saying they are going to do without getting shut down legally.
posted by sjvilla79 at 6:08 PM on November 14, 2005

I remember around 2000 I had a friend in college who would always accidently use the word download in everyday situations. "Lets go and download a pint" (seriously) etc. He regularly talked about "downloading" TV programs onto videos rather than "taping" them and we guffawed. But guffaw no longer, the future is upon us. What I am getting at is that the URL is really good and connects with some homely notion rather than all those 1010100101's.
posted by fire&wings at 6:35 PM on November 14, 2005

I don't get it. Just tell me, can I use this to watch CBC or not?
posted by duck at 6:43 PM on November 14, 2005

I know this started as a joke, but it really does have some merit. It doesn't hurt that the people behind it (who happen to be very nice) are just as surprised as we are that the idea actually makes sense. I'm especially interested in the "what episode you're on" feature since that is one differentiator among the other torrent trackers.
posted by marc1919 at 6:59 PM on November 14, 2005

What we need is Tivo for Torrents. I can't tell if this is it or not.
posted by sexymofo at 7:04 PM on November 14, 2005

Tivo for Torrents.
posted by TonyRobots at 7:09 PM on November 14, 2005

XBMC for Torrents would be more likely. And people are basically doing that already: pull down a rss listing of shows, use a regex to find the ones you want, automatically download them, and watch them from your modded XBox.
posted by smackfu at 7:50 PM on November 14, 2005

*thinks whistfully of icravetv.com before the man shut it down*
posted by blue_beetle at 8:16 PM on November 14, 2005

ah....icravetv.com had CBC. Those were the days...
posted by duck at 8:19 PM on November 14, 2005

Free Tivo for Torrents (...ish). Comes equipped to play the inevitable cat-and-mouse game.
posted by grahamwell at 6:24 AM on November 15, 2005

Although they are teasing the Cat ...

" .. and now we are on the way to get more people using the program, meaning more publicity and even so, this might open the eye's of the TV channel's that these shows are aired on. Just hold on tight, the future might be near."

It may be near, but we may not like it. Pussycat Disney/abc can't be too pleased that (as far as I could see) last Thursday there were three-quarters of a million people simultaneously downloading "Lost", HD and Commercial Free - just through one site.
posted by grahamwell at 9:46 AM on November 15, 2005