P2P file-sharing such as BitTorrent gets all the attention, but a stream of practically every old TV show is only a Google search away.

There's a growing number of ways to legitimately watch television online, although Australians often need to geo-dodge to access services which Americans take for granted. You won't just find the latest episodes of your favourite shows in the Catch Up TV services such as Hulu, you can also revisit the classics with the extensive back catalogues of Netflix, HuluPlus and Amazon Prime.

Classic TV episodes are only a click away, but a range of legit services just won't take our money.

If you're a sci-fi fan you'll find enough TV shows online to last you a lifetime. Simply Google search for "watch insert name of show/episode online", but unfortunately Australians can't access most of the legit options. Of course the very next search result is usually a free pirate stream which is only a click away, without the need to mess about with a VPN, proxy server or US credit card.

As the war on piracy steps up, it's surprising that these supposedly unauthorised online streams don't get more attention. The quality is often good enough to watch on your television, better than the official Catch Up services, assuming you've got access to a flash-enabled browser on the big screen. Old episodes of TV shows take a long time to download via BitTorrent because fewer people are sharing them than new episodes, but click play on a stream and you'll be watching it in a few seconds -- a tempting option if you don't want to keep a copy to watch again. You'll also find a lot of TV shows on YouTube and Vimeo which seem to have been overlooked by the censors.

Stream aggregators such as tubeplus.me and tvseries.net are useful starting points. They don't actually host the TV shows and full length movies, they just make them easy to find. Surely these aggregators haven't gone unnoticed by the copyright police who previously shut down BiTorrent search engines and BitTorrent RSS aggregators such as FeedMyTorrents. Perhaps they're not considered a big enough threat. Even if these aggregators do get shut down, a Google search will still find the goods despite DMCA takedowns of search results.

Quickflix and BBC iPlayer are paving the way in Australia with subscription video services, but it's still early days. Perhaps if we also had legit access to broader services such as Netflix, HuluPlus and Amazon Prime then the free streaming alternatives would seem less appealing. Yet while they refuse to take our money, everything we want to watch is only a stream away.

Once Telstra chokes file-sharing, what's stopping it choking legitimate competitors to "encourage" you to use Bigpond Movies, Telstra voice and other Telstra services?

Telstra's plans to throttle BitTorrent traffic are back in the headlines this week, plans which you might argue are designed to drive away bandwidth hogs so Telstra can simply milk customers who pay for more than they need.

But when you consider the big picture, plans to throttle P2P could also be another step towards throttling legitimate competitors such as the Apple, Sony and Quickflix movie rental services. Then there are the various VoIP services which threaten Telstra's voice revenues. The backend technology used to implement Telstra's P2P crackdown could easily be pointed at such services and the telco giant has a less than spotless track record when it comes to playing fair with competitors.

Such fears are at the heart of the global net neutrality debate, with supporters pushing for laws which guarantee that the internet is a level playing field without ISPs hampering competitors to favour their own services. Net neutrality is more of a political issue in the US, but expect to hear more about it in Australia over the next few years.

In the past Telstra used its minuscule Bigpond download allowances to create a walled garden without walls for its customers, ensuring they would only use Telstra's unmetered services because they couldn't afford the bandwidth to go elsewhere. Now that download limits are more generous, Telstra is looking for new ways to stop you taking your business elsewhere. The T-Box movie rental box is a smart play, but choking the competition might seem like an even smarter play if Telstra thinks it can get away with it.

The ACCC is unlikely to raise an eyebrow at Telstra's plans to throttle P2P traffic, even though there are many legitimate uses for BitTorrent and other P2P services. But if Telstra introduces it unopposed, is the next step to throttle VoIP traffic or competing video services? Will Australia's consumer watchdog come to our defence? Remember, this is the same watchdog which still seems genuinely surprised when the price of petrol goes up before every long weekend.

As the net neutrality debate becomes more prominent in Australia, all eyes will be on Telstra's efforts to play favourites on its network.

If you're relying on a PVR, your chances of seeing every episode of Elementary in its entirety are slim at best.

The silly season is over and our favourite shows such as The Big Bang Theory are returning to the idiot box, along with a few shows which are new for 2013 such as the highly anticipated Elementary. Of course Elementary started screen in the US months ago and we're already 13 episodes behind. It's only "new for 2013" if you've waited to watch it on Australian free-to-air television.

Going on past experience, watching Elementary -- or any other weekly drama -- on Australian television this year will be a painful experience. Expect to miss at least one episode due to a last-minute schedule change or unexpected double episode. Expect to have the end clipped off a few more episodes when they run particularly late -- not fun when Sherlock is just about to unmask the killer.

Network bastardry is to blame and it was the Australian Communications and Media Authority's job to pull them into line. Instead it let them off the hook and now ACMA's best advice is to simply record the following program so you don't miss the end. Frustrating advice from a government watchdog which was supposed to fix this problem once and for all.

Even with Season Passes and generous padding, your PVR can still leave you in the lurch. For all its faults the TiVo is one of  Australia's most reliable PVRs yet it still managed to miss episodes of Homeland, Alcatraz and Terra Nova in the last few years. Now TiVo appears to be on death row in Australia and it's hard to recommend another PVR as a replacement. Even the Freeview EPG PVRs can still let you down.

It seems the only foolproof way to ensure you see every episode of Elementary is to download it from BitTorrent each week, with the added benefit of no promos splashed over the top and no lost dialogue from an overzealous fade to an ad break. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to solve this murder mystery; Australia TV networks are gradually cutting their own throats.

As Quickflix slims down, will Australia's subscription movie market finally take off next year?

After several false starts, 2012 was the year that subscription music services went mainstream in Australia. After years of looking on with envy at foreign services, or tricking them by using a VPN cloak, these days we're spoiled for choice when it comes to legit all-you-can-eat streaming music services. So what about all-you-can-eat movies for one flat-rate per month, similar to US services such as Netflix Watch Instantly, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime?

Quickflix is the closest Australia has to Netflix, but it still has a long and difficult road ahead. This year's launch of the Quickflix Watchnow flat-rate subscription movie service was groundbreaking but a little underwhelming, not helped by no-doubt difficult licensing negotiations with powerful movie houses that clearly learned important lessons from the digital music revolution. HBO kicked in some cash but now Quickflix is shedding staff to reduce costs, even though it continues to expand and sign up new hardware partners for the streaming service. You can watch Quickflix Watchnow on an impressive number of devices but, with the exception of a few HBO hits, there's just not that much worth watching.

As the National Broadband Network finally rolls down Australian streets the subscription movie scene looks set to take off in the next few years, with giants such as Hoyts possibly getting into the game. Quickflix has its work cut out for it in 2013, trying to stay afloat while fighting off competitors with deep pockets who have sat back and watched the early players do the hard work sowing the seeds of a new market. You can bet the likes of Telstra, Microsoft, Google and Sony are keen to reap that harvest, as they've already the hardware, services and relationships in place. Australia's major video rental chains have also toyed with the idea of streaming services for some years.

Apple would seem another obvious player, but Cupertino's reluctance to embrace a subscription music service makes subscription movies seem unlikely in the near future. You should also keep an eye on Foxtel, which has seen the writing on the wall and is embracing IPTV.

As the NBN fibre snakes its way around the country, I think we can expect the heavy-hitters to at least dip their toes in Australia's fledgling subscription movie market in 2013. It will be interesting to see who decides to take the plunge first and whether they sink or swim.

I've just added a 2TB drive to my media centre in anticipation of the Christmas rush.

Amazon UK tends to be my Christmas shopping destination of choice these days, stocking up on movies and music for family and friends. It's less complicated than buying from Amazon US, as Australia and the UK both use the PAL video standard. You do however need a multi-region DVD player to watch UK Region 2 discs, as Australia is part of Region 4 (which makes the region-locked PlayStation 3 such a frustrating media player). Thankfully Australia and the UK are in the same region when it comes to Blu-ray movies.

Despite the ease of legally downloading content, I still prefer the security blanket and improved sound and video quality of a physical disc -- which I can then format-shift as I see fit. I can then store the original away in a cool, dry place. Call me old-fashioned, but I'm not ready to completely abandon physical media just yet.

After I recently scratched a brand new DVD I'm now extra cautious when it comes to backing up my movies, even though it's still against the law in Australia. With a few expensive DVD and Blu-ray box sets under the Christmas tree this year, I'm taking extra care. AnyDVD HD lets me rip them without losing picture quality, while HandBrake compresses them for watching on handheld devices. The latest version of HandBrake can even rip directly from Blu-ray discs if something like AnyDVD HD is installed, although you might need to upgrade to the latest version of AnyDVD HD to bypass the protection on the latest Blu-ray movies.

Windows 7's default media centre interface turns my media centre into a video jukebox, with the My Movies plugin downloading artwork and other details just like iTunes does with music CDs. I had a lot of trouble importing my HandBrake Blu-ray rips into iTunes even though they'd place nicely in QuickTime. iTunes was sorting them into the Home Videos folder, but they still wouldn't show up in iTunes.

After a lot of Google searching I eventually discovered that simply restarting iTunes was enough to fix the problem, although your mileage may vary. Once I could see them in ITunes I simply went into the file properties and changed the Media Kind from Home Video to Movie. I then used MetaX to add all the metadata including cover art. I ran into a few issues with MetaX as well, causing movies not to play correctly, but enabling support for large files and not copying the chapter titles seemed to fix the problem.

Ripping all my movies is now becoming second nature, with $99 for a new 2TB USB3.0 drive a small price to pay to have all our content at our fingertips without the risk of grubby fingers destroying an optical disc.

What's your strategy for protecting optical discs this holiday season?