Only if they pay the licensing fee for Australia, surely.

Yea - stick your IP address out there, broadcast it to the world.

Hutch - any chance you can tell us how to download from newsgroups?

I thought Labor pledged to filter torrents because they are used by pedos and copyright infringers?

Apparently they can check each bit individually and it won't slow the connection down one iota

ve know vot you are vatching..............

That's where IP blockers come in handy.

I only download using a VPN - works well.

Meaning: the content generators won't let Google broadcast their content in Australia unless they've paid them a fee, surely? NBC (or whoever makes it) charges 7 (or whatever channel it's on) good money to broadcast Desperate Housewives in Australia. Why would they let Google show it here for less or nothing? And if they paid the same fee for it, they have to make their money back somehow which means the same ads, more or less. But in any case Google has never been very keen on actually paying others for content.

Or have I completely misunderstood what you were saying?

I believe Google TV will not operate in this way (i.e. you can watch Lost, 24 etc through Google itself). It will integrate with your existing payed service, for example Foxtel in Australia, Sky/Virgin in UK.

But it will also provide free-to-air TV just the same as you get freeview now.

You also will either need to buy equipment with the hardware for doing this, Sony will are making the first TV, Logictech are making the first set-top box.

I dont think it will work in your normal desktop/notebook browser - but I could be wrong about this - there's not a lot of info from google about this.

It certainly wont work with my Ipad though because it uses Flash

OOOOOOOhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. So it's kind of a virtual PVR?

Fair enough, although IP TV is in it's infancy, I reckon it will be a complete game changer for the media industry. They will attempt to control it - and to a certain degree they can. But ultimately, unless they embrace it and try and offer something that is good and value for money, they are finished.

Apparently you can get XBMC to do all of this automatically.... So I'm shelving the PS3... even though that was fairly good for streaming.(not so good for causing my 12yo son to argue about it's use) I"m going down the Revo plus XBMC route, with all the Autos set up. Rss feeds, Automatic Torrents, latest episodes, and VPN. (hulu, channel 4/5, bbc, ITV) Hopefully this really will be the end of Foxtel. I'm trialing it all on a Laptop first.

Shouldn't this thread be "Why is Foxtel so rubbish?"

Well I personally hate torrents. They're unsafe, often slow, require upstream bandwidth and sites often operate a ludicrous metering system which quite frankly I cannot be arsed with. I mean, let's not even get into all the US and worldwide organisations that seed the torrent sites with duff uploads just to harvest IP addresses (blocked or otherwise). Newsgroups you get the same (or better) content, downloaded at the full speed of your connection and enjoy all the same facilities such as single-click downloads. Since the parts that make up the archives are simply ASCII text there's piss all to be monitored, the traffic's only one way (unlike torrents) so you aren't distributing (which is what most prosecutions have been based on) and my ISP and most Usenet sites do not even track headers, plus outside agencies have no access and even if they did it uses SSL encryption so you're ****ing invisible.

I use a program called SabNZB on my MacMini. I get free newsgroup access via my ISP (Internode) - if you don't get a free feed it costs about $10 a month for your own. Newsgroup downloads are tracked on sites like NZBMatrix and Newzbin. I have searches set up on those sites (piss easy to set up - just search and right click on the RSS icon in your URL bar and copy the link) which I have installed in SabNZB.

So every hour Sab goes and looks at the NZB sites, checks my RSS feeds for my shows and if it finds one, it adds it to a download queue. Then it downloads it (according to a totally configurable schedule), repairs any download errors, extracts it, renames it in an indexable way, copies it to my TV directory and sends me a message over the network to let me know it's there. I can connect to the central SabNZB server over the network or internet and monitor or cue up any downloads I want.

Every couple of weeks I have a good look on the TV and movie sites - see what's coming out (Sherlock on the Beeb, X Factor on ITV, Boardwalk Empire or whatever) and I add the search to Sab accordingly. It monitors everything, makes sure I don't download the same show twice and gets everything set up beautifully for use in Plex, Boxee, Front Row or XBMC.

So when I lower my arse onto that sofa in the evening to watch TV I get to see commercial-free stuff that I'm interested in. Since Plex and Boxee hook into the increasingly impressive array of online stuff (ABC iView, BBC iPlayer, YouTube or whatever) I hardly ever watch any broadcast TV at all.