The Scene
Jun 19
Posted: under TV.
I was looking at Legaltorents.com the other day and I happened across The Scene. It’s basically a show that’s released online with a new episode about once a month. It’s about an underground movie release group. From the site:
NYU student Brian Sandro has a secret: he and his friends pirate hundreds of millions of dollars of illicit Hollywood movies in their spare time. They are revered, reviled, hunted, and admired. No one knows who they are – at least, not as far as they know.
Really, that description is overly dramatic in my opinion. I won’t even begin to discuss what exactly “hundreds of millions of dollars” refers to…… It’s the gist of the show though. They’re pirates copyright infringers who take movies, sometimes before they’re even released on DVD, and put them online. By online I mean on IRC and usenet and “secret” FTP sites and such (though probably more of the latter that then spreads to the former two)….the way it was done it days of old (the way it’s still done really….it just used to be just about the ONLY way it was done on the internet itself).
The whole thing is really just someone’s desktop with a webcam picture of them in the corner. You watch as they chat on IRC and IM people….That’s how the story is told for the most part. The first few episodes also start off showing what songs they’re playing in iTunes, though they discontinue this trend eventually. Most of the episodes are about 15 minutes long, which is a nice length I think.
For some reason I find the show interesting….I have little idea why. Maybe it’s because the whole thing reminds me of myself in a way. I haven’t been involved in “the scene” in quite a few years and never involved from their perspective. Hell, I even pretty much gave up chatting 5 or 6 years ago….( no friends here…). There’s just something about sitting in front of a computer I can relate to I guess…. I don’t know. I just enjoy watching the story unfold. I even like it despite the fact that it seems unrealistic. I guess what I mean by that is mostly that they personify the encoding…. the guy in the show who does the encoding tends to act like he puts in 6 hours of work into each release when what he really does is click on a couple of buttons and then waits 6 hours while his computer does all the work. Yeah, the computer would be largely so useless for anything else during that time, but still, it’s not like it’s hard work or something. They also talk about how fast this guy is at doing it all the time. They make it sound like he’s just great at it and super quick when really it’s all about the hardware. I’m also not really sure about that 6 hours figure they throw out there. I don’t do a lot of encoding, but I’m thinking that 6 hours to encode 8 gigs isn’t all that fast. That seems only a little faster than the speed my computer runs at, and my computer is basically 3 years old now. But now I’m knitpicking… 
And of course that’s not to say that it’s unrealistic per-se. It’s fictional, but, this is how this kind of thing is traditionally done. By traditionally I mean this is how it always used to be done. I can’t really say how true that is in today’s world as I really don’t pay enough attention to know one way or the other, though I’m sure there’s some truth here.
I like it so much that I’ve been seeding the torrent for days now….my ratio is up over 6 now, which is quite a bit since the 9-episode torrent that I got my hands on is like 504 MB. If it sounds at all interesting to you, check out their site and pick your favorite way to download it. It’s released under a creative commons license and is free to copy and spread around as you see fit as long as you give the authors credit for it and don’t make derivative works. You can just download one episode instead of all 9 if you want to as well. That’ll set you back closer to 40 megs than 500.
