‘Steve TV’

I was a reluctant convert, to say the least. When I got the call from my old friend Richard back in late 2005, he sounded far too enthusiastic about the latest Internet gimmick that was going to “change my life.” Richard, you see, is prone to great enthusiasms, and I was not particularly disposed to listen to his ravings about some Web site called UKNova, which supposedly let him download all kinds of amazing British TV shows completely free of charge.

I relented and signed up for UKNova membership. The site functions as a “torrent tracker,” a skeletal database that allows users to locate and share digital files with other users. Unlike some previous peer-to-peer content-sharing programs, the files are not located on a Web site or taken from any single source; they’re shared among members in the form of tiny digital fragments that are eventually reconstituted, like a completed jigsaw puzzle, as a single file on your desktop. The operation—which incidentally makes it difficult to sue members of a site like UKNova—is enabled by an ingenious little software application called BitTorrent, a paradigmatic advance in file sharing that has engendered many variants since its 2002 advent.

Loath as I am to admit it, UKNova did change my life—at least as far as my viewing habits are concerned. After downloading free BitTorrent software, I could use UKNova to procure—slowly at first—television shows that would have hitherto obliged me to beg British friends and relatives to record them for me on VHS (remember tapes?) and send via airmail. The unalloyed thrill of watching all this downloaded Brit-TV stuff easily outweighed the nagging shame of staring at a computer screen for hours on end.

Mock if you will, but I assure you that this was nothing but top-drawer telly: a typical evening’s viewing schedule might include an episode of Peter Ackroyd’s magisterial history of London, the upsetting documentary Rock Family Trees: The Prog Rock Years, and another on postwar British universities that made me feel vindicated for bypassing higher education. And thanks to the many kind souls who are digitizing their dusty VHS stacks for UKNova dissemination, I’ve acquired all manner of presumed-lost British TV classics, from the sci-fi mockumentary Alternative 3 to the groovy 1970 kids show Here Come the Double Deckers.

I began storing all my UKNova downloads on blank DVDs—first on spindles of 10, then 25, then 50. I soon had enough material to program my own TV channel—Steve TV!—for weeks on end; my Time Warner Cable box was switched on only for live soccer games and weekly HBO favorites. This UKNova habit went well beyond the recreational-use stage: according to site statistics, I have downloaded a frankly embarrassing 800 gigabytes’ worth of files—well over 1,500 hours of programming. And since UKNova expects members to maintain a decent balance between material uploaded and downloaded, my computer stayed connected to the Internet for, more or less, 18 months straight in order to allow other users access to my file fragments. The cost of two burned-out hard drives seemed like a small price to pay.

Then this BitTorrent junkie discovered that Philips made a DVD player (Model DVP642) that would play, straight from the disc, UKNova files that previously required hours of reprocessing to watch on a standard player. Which is when I started making over-enthusiastic phone calls to my friends.

Surprisingly, not everyone was receptive to my BitTorrent evangelism—in fact, some went as far as to suggest I had turned into some kind of cyber-criminal. Sure, I knew that the Motion Picture Association of America claimed worldwide losses of $18.2 billion to movie piracy in 2005, $7.1 billion of which was ascribed to Internet file sharing. And I knew that even though the U.S. government had shut down prominent Internet operations for violating copyright laws—eDonkey, Grokster, Kazaa—there are now many BitTorrent mega-sites that continue to thrive; in particular, the Pirate Bay (ThePirateBay.org), based in Sweden, stands as probably the prime destination for anyone looking to download, unrestricted, the very latest in Hollywood movies, video games, TV shows, music, software, and pornography.