My favourite castaways are back on television, but should I Tivo season five of Lost or just pull it down off BitTorrent?

I had plenty of favourite shows B.C. (Before Children), but these days Lost is one of the few I make an effort to watch. BitTorrent meant I wasn't at the mercy of wildy fluctuating television schedules but, in theory, TiVo should be just as good. Of course if I download it, it won't have ads in it and will probably have less of those scrolling banner ads that networks like to superimpose over shows.

Lost kicked off in the US more than a week ago but, in Australia, Network Seven is still spruiking it as "Coming in February". I guess they've abandoned the whole idea of trying to screen it within a few days of the US screening - a practice dubbed "Fast-tracking". The apparent failure of Fast-tracking might help Seven to realise that people don't use BitTorrent because they want to see shows quickly, they use BitTorrent because they're sick of networks screwing with the schedule.

One thing in TiVo's favour is that it's set and forget. I've never had luck using RSS feeds to replicate this with BitTorrent, instead I've manually found each new episode on sites such as ISOhunt. I'm intrigued by FeedMyTorrents, a BitTorrent RSS service with detailed set-up guides for BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent and Azureus. I'm a big fan of uTorrent because it's lightweight and it makes it easy to schedule my downloads at off-peak times. Thanks to my VPN, I laugh at Conroy's pathetic dreams of filtering out file sharers.

As an experiment, I think I'll use BitTorrent and TiVo to watch Lost this season. Considering TiVo is backed by Seven in Australia, I'll be interested to see if it can manage to keep up with the network's habit of running shows late and shuffling the schedule. I'll be shocked if the TiVo can manage to record every minute of every episode of Lost. Things might look grim for our castaways, but at least BitTorrent will be there to save the day.