All it takes is a crowd with an itch, and what it gets is Hollywood's worst nightmare: PVRBlog reports on how show-trading fans in the Personal Video Recorder world have pooled their programming talents to solve the content-discovery problem

The hottest new improvement is made possible by the merging of two of the Internet's newest innovations, the p2p protocol BitTorrent and RSS, the popular Web syndication standard. Together, these systems allow a computer to automatically find and download a user's favorite shows -- something like having a TV station designed just for you.

Or a radio station. Or a movie theatre. Couple this with an aggregator service like Torrents.co.uk or pick and choose your own sources of bittorrent RSS links and away you go, track what takes your fancy by regular search expressions, download the sure-things, flag the interesting ... instant TiVO without the expense and legal bother of actually owning one.

The two leading desktop apps for surfing this new BT/RSS space are the portable java-based BuTtReSS and TV RSS, a Gtk2-Perl Torrent RSS feed reader for linux. Both programs are early-release free-software hosted on the SourceForge

wouldn't you know, now there's 2239 channels and still nothing on but Stargate, Monk or Drew Carey ...