During his stay in prison, Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij was deprived of the Internet and forced to view broadcast TV. A grueling experience, but not as bad as it used to be, something the Pirate Bay can take credit for in part. Still, Fredrik believes that there's plenty of room for improvement.

Fredrik Neij, one of The Pirate Bay’s co-founders, was released early May after serving a 10-month prison sentence for his involvement with the site.

He has since returned to his home in Laos, where he’s picking up his life again. Speaking with TF, Fredrik says that he didn’t miss computers or the Internet as much as he’d expected.

What Fredrik missed the most about being ‘disconnected’ was instant access to news, information and entertainment. Instead of having access to the latest movies and TV-series without interruptions, he was forced to watch broadcast TV.

“Watching broadcast TV again for the first time in roughly 12 years was gruesome. I don’t know how people stand the commercial breaks without going insane,” Fredrik tells TorrentFreak.

However, the Pirate Bay co-founder also admits that quite a bit of progress has been made in recent years. In part, Hollywood and the video entertainment industry made these changes to give consumers something they would otherwise get on sites such as The Pirate Bay.

“I saw a lot of things that probably would not have existed without The Pirate Bay, like every channel having their own streaming services, and the short time between US premiere and it being aired on networks worldwide, usually just a few days or a week,” Fredrik says.

Netflix is a prime example of a video streaming service that has become a great success. But from a Pirate Bay user perspective there is still plenty of room for improvement.

For example, people should be able to get all their video entertainment at one service, instead of having to use a dozen or so. Similarly, blocking access to potential customers based on their location is an outdated business model that has to go.

“While I think all the new streaming services are great, if they want to take on piracy for real, they need to combine all services behind a common pay-wall so you don’t need several accounts to follow your favorite shows,” Fredrik notes.

“They also really need to address the geo-blocking problems and provide global availability of the all content at the same price. Until big media makes it as easy or easier to get all your media in one place no matter where you live, there will be a need for sites like TPB.”

Of course, The Pirate Bay doesn’t use any geo-blocking tools and the site also has a content library that beats any legal service. Because of this, TPB’s co-founder believes that the site will remain popular for a while.

Now that Fredrik’s back home he can catch up on Doctor Who and Archer again. He’s also closely following Pirate Bay related developments, last year’s raid in particular.

“Back when I ran things it only took three days to get back up from a raid. The new team took a good 6 weeks, but they have been doing a good job on TPB these last few years, and eventually restored the site to its former glory,” Fredrik says.

And even if the police managed to take the site down again, new Pirate Bays will take over as long as the demand is there.

“Even if TPB is permanently shutdown, the December raid shows that there will always be sites ready to fill the void. One again showing that meeting consumer demand is far more effective than trying to enforce lobby-bought laws with no support among the general public,” Fredrik concludes.