@rick_777
You almost go’ ,
/t/funny Ac

{A Soldierofachan 547 points S years ago @​

M'kay, so here's a brief rundown on how television piracy works, the answer
to many of the questions you're going to ask is either "for fun’ or "bragging
rights.”

So a show usually first airs on the east coast, time zones being what they
are, and that means if you want to be a successful TV piracy group, you
have to have a guy somewhere on the east coast who's recording their TV.
Using private FTPs, that guy then uploads his file either in its entirety or
‘somewhat compressed, depending on his level of skill. There are
painstakingly strict rules about exactly how one of these files is
compressed and what formats are used, and if you don't follow them, your
release is ignored and shunned (the insider term is "nuked’).

So dozens of people all over the east coast are in a competition to create
and upload the cleanest, most correct version of an episode to their private
FTPs. Access to these FTPs is practically impossible to get. You'd need to
know some very paranoid people very well, and then pay them for access.
The people who do have access to the various FTPs have their own FTPs
that are easier to get into (but still cost money) and they aggregate all the
content. People connected to this second tier of FTPs run a daily
competition for every episode of every show (not to mention movies, comic
books, music, and many other things) to see which release group is the first
to push out a perfect copy. This release gets branded with the group's
name and is known as the official, or "scene" release. All other releases are
ignored,

From FTPs, the files work their way down to Usenet groups, which are
technically public, but difficult to navigate and full of viruses. People who
download off of Usenet tend to subscribe to private pay sites called
indexers that do the hard work of sorting out the trash and decoding the
esoteric secret codes these groups use to obfuscate the episodes (Usenet
is subject to DMCA takedowns, so they'll come up with code names for
shows to keep the robots from catching on, like calling Mad Men "60's
Pimps’).

From Usenet, the files travel to very private torrent sites (who have their
‘own race to see who's the first to put up the file), and from there it goes to
less private torrent sites, and then public sites like The Pirate Bay, and
finally the streaming sites. This being the Internet, it goes without saying
that the people on every tier of this ladder openly sneer at the people below
them and generally fear any of them working out that there's another rung
they can go up.

So to answer your question, some dude in Louisville was part of the group
that was the first to upload a perfect copy of this episode, his scene release
became the standard for all pirates, and worked its way down from FTPs to
Usenet to torrents to streaming sites to the cut up picture you see here
today.