I’m a long time reader and occasional poster to this forum, have over 100GB of SF material of which 100% was purchased. I spend about $100 a month on SF material so I feel I have the moral authority to post on this matter in good conscience.

Foxtel, my pay TV provider, recently launched a service where you could download copies of the shows and movies they aired as part of your subscription package to your PC and watch them later. To do this, you download the media player (free) from their website and register your PC on their website. From there, it works in a manner similar to iTunes, except that the content downloaded expires after a predetermined period of time.

The SF producers could investigate something similar with their clips (save for the expiry of the videos) to reduce the probability of piracy. I don’t doubt the security could be cracked and the clips converted to a universal format, but it would certainly stop 99% of piracy from non technical users.

Hopefully someone in the SF community more technically minded than me (I’m an accountant, not an IT guy) could contribute more to the technical side of the idea I’ve presented, or suggest something which works better.

Thanks