Yotam Yogev and Liat Malka were both kind enough to translate the NRG/Maariv article written about Nucleus.
A second article was written (and soon I hope to be translated into english <hint> <hint> ) for Ynet.
The shows download on themselves [paraphrase on "The tears go do on themselves", a line from a known Israeli child song]The next generation of downloading files: a new software will search & download movies & shows to the PC without th touch of human hands
by Ido Kenan 3/6/2004 17:33
(Taken from "Life 2.0" column in "The Net" section of NRG)
An old Bazooka Joe goes something about like this:
"I would have invented a machine that would do homework by only pushing a button. -And I would have invented a machine that would push the button."
This joke truly represents the bad status of P2P software users: in order to get a movie or show for free, one must seek them. "Finding the shows you like & downloading them have become a chore" that's the way Ray Slakinski describes the tragedy, but also gives solution: a software called Nucleus.
Nucleus, who's 1.0 version Slakinski launched 2 days ago, will follow for you after your favorite shows, and will download to your PC every new episode of it that would go online the P2P network of BitTorerent. All you have to do is to enter the show's name (or keywords, according to your choice) and to setup the software when to work, preferably on hours you don't work on the net, so it won't slow down your surfing.
"I hate my VCR""I started to develop Nucleus because I hate my VCR, and people shared episodes of TV shows on P2P networks", says Slakinski (27), a quality control worker in a software company in Canada. "There was a buzz on some websites (Dave Whiner, Chris Phrillo etc.) about the need of combining RSS & BitTorrent, I ran some searches in order to understand how to do it and I wrote the basic Nucleus in a few hours. The current version took me only 10 hours to develop. and there are still things I want to do with it".
The idea behind Nucleus is TiVo, which records many hours of TV on a hard drive according to keywords. but TiVo cost money, and requires cable/satellite with an electronic programming schedule in the right format. So '86. Nucleus, on the opposite hand, consumes only electricity and Internet connection.
How does it work?To track the episodes, Nucleus uses RSS, a format who's main purpose is to keep up to date on the changes in websites. In order to understand how it works, we need to understand the distribution method of BitTorrent. BitTorrent itself does not have a search option - in order to find an episode of some show, you have to run a search on Google on the sow's name with the word "bittorrent". The results are torrent files, which are direction to a tracker, and clicking on them opens the software on the search PC and starts to search the file over the net.
Another gun in the revolutionSlakinski's software is not only a lazy man's paradise, but also a part of a gad fly of change in the way TV is considered as an entertainment-oriented medium from one that's consumed passively (reception of a transmission) to one that's consumed actively (search & download), like the Internet. The blogger Scott Raymond invented a word to describe the act of show picking with Nucleus etc.: broadcatching, a paraphrase on broadcasting.
Chris Phriilo, formerly known from the geek channel TechTV, called BitTorrent "TiVo for poors". The payment issue arrived also with Matt Hawie in the blog PVRblog, which is about digital VCRs: "Of course the legal ethics around the technology would become impossible in long term, but this might be a peek to where the entertainment can go".