Transcript of Interview:
Chris R. of ShareTV.org
Question 1) What makes ShareTV.org special? What unique services does it do for its readers that they cannot get elsewhere on the Net?
Chris R. of ShareTV.org: ShareTV.org tracks the best TV torrents and makes them easy to access with a well organized system. We currently index torrents for over 250 shows and are adding more every day. Each show has its own page with a single torrent listed per episode with its name, description and air date. We try to eliminate some of the common frustrations, so we make sure all our torrents are verified and only list the highest quality videos with the most seeders. The site is geared toward beginners and definitely the easiest way to find and download missed TV shows.
Question 2) What drives you to provide this web service? Is this a recreational hobby for you, or something more serious?
Chris R. of ShareTV.org: (I do it because of) the flawed approach by which television is setup. Networks limit their broadcasts to a single country. They require viewers to watch at a specific time and they base their ratings on a very small portion of their audience. By distributing TV shows through torrents this solves all those problems.
Question 3) What do you hope to achieve in the world of P2P? Do you want to be "another torrent site" that is just more friendly/more fast? Or perhaps you want to achieve a specific unique goal, like promoting documentaries and indie productions, for example?
Chris R. of ShareTV.org: The site will be exclusively for TV shows. What we want to see in the future is for the Television Networks to get on board. And get a site with every show ever produced so users can easily get any show at anytime for free regardless if they are in the US or not.
Question 4) Who do you personally consider to be the top 3 torrent sites, besides ShareTV.org? Who would you like to be compared to out there?
Chris R. of ShareTV.org:
- torrentz.com - best meta search engine
- eztvefnet.org - largest distribution group of recently aired TV shows
- mininova.org - hosts a lot of quality torrents
The problem I see with most torrent sites is that they are too confusing, and are riddled with advertisements. These 3 sites have done a good job of keeping a clean user-friendly environment.
Question 5) How do you feel about the risk of being prosecuted by a civil lawsuit? Why don't the MPAA and RIAA intimidate you?
Chris R. of ShareTV.org: The RIAA goes after pirated music. The MPAA does go after pirated television, but their main focus is on pirated movies. Besides we don't actually host the actual videos. We simply index torrents from many sources, like Google does with web pages. Hopefully the networks will realize that the intentions of ShareTV.org is not to cut into their revenues, but to increase their viewing audience. When users are able to download missed episodes they are more likely to continue watching on television.
Question 6) One more question, Chris. Most readers do not understand the personal costs to run a web database. Would you be willing to tell us what kind of monthly costs it takes to run ShareTV.org?
Chris R. of ShareTV.org: Running a popular website is not cheap. There are server costs, bandwidth, co-hosting, etc. I hope to fund the site off donations and a couple small advertisements. In the future we'd also like to set it up to link to the DVD for each show. The commission will help fund the site and also support the networks who created the show.
About.com) Thank you, Chris. Your time is very much appreciated. It is good to hear from the other side of the P2P controversy to balance out the alarmist corporate giants who dominate the P2P news.
For more information on ShareTV.org, visit the site at http://ShareTV.org.
