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September 03, 2005
Outsourcing Piracy the Chinese Way
When it comes to watching premium content on cable television you can go the legal way or the Chinese way. In the US a household pays on average around $40 (US) for cable television. In New York gold package costs around $80, movie channels such as HBO costs $11 extra.
You can get same premium channels today on the Internet for free from Chinese P2P sites. Cable television companies are battling the same kind of piracy issues that Napster started with the music industry.
P2P streaming TV is the latest generation of peer-to-peer technology. This new method turns an ordinary computer capturing the TV channel into a rebroadcaster of video streams . The signal, which is taken live off TV systems mostly in China, is delayed by about a minute before it shows up on computer screens in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media or RealNetworks Inc.'s Real Player program.
US regulators and media associations are just begining to look into such piracy practices trying to figure out what actions to take.
Posted by admin at September 3, 2005 08:00 AM