(Posted from Geneva, Switzerland, 10 am local time.)

The New York Times has published an odd, unfortunately named article, “Steal This Show,” that discusses homebrew personal-video-recording technologies such as MythTV as well as the distributed file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent. Let’s leave aside whether time-shifting television with an off-brand counterpart to TiVo is “stealing.” A more important problem with the article is that it gives a false impression of the normal user experience of BitTorrent:

Created by Bram Cohen, a 29-year-old programmer in Bellevue, Wash., BitTorrent breaks files hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a song file into small pieces to speed its path to the Internet and then to your computer. On the kind of peer-to-peer site that gave the music industry night sweats, an episode of “Desperate Housewives” that some fan copied and posted on the Internet can take hours to download; on BitTorrent, it arrives in minutes.

That hasn’t been my experience of BitTorrent, and I doubt many other ordinary users routinely experience the downloading of TV programs in “minutes.” On the off chance that BitTorrent speeds had suddenly improved since I had last used the application, I conducted an experiment — I downloaded the latest episode of Showtime’s program “Huff,” which stars Hank Azaria, within 24 hours of its having aired. (Downloading a program shortly after it has aired, when interest in the episode is at its peak, is the way to maximize download speed on BitTorrent.) The result? Even with the premium broadband service I have at my office, downloading Episode 13 of “Huff” — the final episode of the season — took six hours, with download speeds rarely exceeding 30KB/sec.

Note that what I succeeded in downloading was a relatively low-resolution version of the episode — lower in resolution even than regular analog television. An HDTV version of the episode, in full resolution, might have taken ten times longer. (I’d have tried capturing such an episode, but such HDTV files are generally so large that most people don’t try to share them over the Internet, even with BitTorrent.)

Don’t get me wrong: BitTorrent is a significant advance over last-generation file-sharing programs, especially in terms of maximizing use of bandwidth. What it doesn’t do, at least for ordinary broadband users, is enable the kind of rapid downloading of TV content that the Motion Picture Association of America believes it must attack.

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