Commercial Usenets Offer Petabytes – for a Cost
Newsgroups have been around for more than three decades. The Usenet protocol originated to serve the academic community back in the days of 300 BAUD modems. Newsgroups still store bits and pieces of larger media files in the text and binary file formats that were best suited to early fora and discussion boards. Usenets are an integral part of the Internet's early history. We may never have heard the acronym FAQ had it not been popularized in newsgroups. In recent years, commercial services are marketing pay-as-you-go memberships to secure, anonymous, uncensored newsgroups.
As the Internet has expanded to store and distribute broadband media such as movies, music and images, both centralized client-server and decentralized peer-to-peer networks have come under the scrutiny of the legal teams representing commercial content producers.
The RIAA and MPAA have both brought successful lawsuits against both private users and commercial downloading services. Hence, more broadband subscribers are approaching any kind of file sharing activity with new levels of trepidation. At first, the usenet provider community avoided this kind of legal scrutiny, but since 2006 even they have not been spared the wrath of the courts.
As the Internet has expanded to store and distribute broadband media such as movies, music and images, both centralized client-server and decentralized peer-to-peer networks have come under the scrutiny of the legal teams representing commercial content producers.
The RIAA and MPAA have both brought successful lawsuits against both private users and commercial downloading services. Hence, more broadband subscribers are approaching any kind of file sharing activity with new levels of trepidation. At first, the usenet provider community avoided this kind of legal scrutiny, but since 2006 even they have not been spared the wrath of the courts.
Both the highly fragmented nature of newsgroup files and the large number of redundant servers have attracted downloaders to newsgroup providers because these qualities enable superior downloading speed, security and satisfaction. The required learning curve for the NNTP protocol, however, is rather steep for the casual user or novice. Commercial uncensored newsgroups have developed an appealing portal providing casual downloaders with both transparent file search and retrieval and SSL-enabled anonymity. End users will gladly pay a monthly fee for the privilege of anonymously accessing terabytes worth of coveted media files.
As mainstream commercial providers like Netflix step into the digital media distribution space, premium uncensored newsgroups services will come under pricing pressure. Anyone interested in subscribing to a for-pay usenet service would be well advised to survey the competition. One option would be to try before you buy with a free usenet trial. This avenue allows novices to assess their comfort levels with the anonymous usenet and then either choose a pay-as-you-go plan or opt out before the service begins charging their credit cards.
Precisely because this sector is now dominated by commercial interests, it has become difficult to find objective reviews about these services. If you are interested in trying out one of the mainstream uncensored newsgroups it would behoove you to bone up on terms like file retention, uptime, secure sockets layer, security and download completion.
