Many of you will have heard of it and "some" of you might have even taken the step to use it to get your favourite TV series from the States...... Bittorrent. With the lack of a legal alternative for quality TV shows (who wants to pay for ipod sized video's....) quickly after they are aired in the states many people turned to "the darkside" of the internet and downloaded their favourite shows.

But if ABC pushed forward with their plans you might not need to turn to the darkside anymore as in May and June they will be making their popular tv shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Commander in Chief and Alias available on the interweb for absolutely free. Best of all you don't even have to wait very long as streams become available only a day after the episode is originally aired.

However there is a catch, although you might be able to watch a show even you want and fast-forward and rewind, they won't allow you to skip the ads Which is not surprising as they will have to make their money some way or another. Throughout the 2 month trial period they will experiment with different formats of advertising. Each episode will be sponsored by a single advertiser who will get 3 breaks instead of the usual 5.

No news yet on what the quality of the shows will be that are going to be streamed but with high speed broadband even becoming more common in the UK we might even see some HD streams (one can hope).

So what do you think? Will this stop people from torrenting new episodes? Will the legal nature of this solution attract as many people as their illegal counterparts? And if this becomes more successfull will we see shows appearing quicker on UK Tv? Well I just hope that this pilot works and doesn't get killed due to its own popularity. Lets just hope that free video on demand is the way of the future.

Original article