It's true that television on the other side of the Atlantic is in the midst of a renaissance, and in the face of commentators' increasingly frenzied exhortations to watch it - all of it - I'm sure many of us are forced into resorting to dubious methods to keep up. Enter alluc.org, the increasingly popular link-hosting site.
Although Alluc (it's pronounced 'all-you-see') skirts the fringes of legality by detailing links to streaming copyright content without actually making any available itself, it's often the only means British viewers can keep up with new US TV shows. Many of which, remember, won't be aired by British channels for months, if they're not passed over or buried on cable. And although many US shows are available to stream after transmission from their own networks' sites, these are often US-only features.
Alluc also points you to sites which stream movies, many of which are new theatrical releases, which is much harder to justify as anything other than piracy, albeit a profitless variety. But anyway, who wants to watch a big-budget production on a screen the size of your average mobile phone, when it was probably recorded on said phone in the cinema anyway? No, the real benefactor of this site, in many senses, is television.
Heroes creator Tim Kring noted in the latest edition of the Radio Times that many European fans of his show - a huge success in the States, and debuting on BBC2 this month - first became acquainted with it via the internet. This, in turn, created the word of mouth which has seen Heroes' first episode flogged furiously amidst the BBC's trailing schedule, while, for example, I watched the first couple of episodes of The Wire in jerky, scaled down format through Alluc, then went out and bought the seasons one and two box sets the next day. As far as viral marketing outlets for their product goes, the big networks couldn't ask for much better, nor one which hits closer to home with the early adopters.
All of which means Alluc is another web-based fairytale waiting to happen. Originally conceived by three German teenagers as a way of linking every episode of Family Guy available on the web (it was called allfg.org at the time), the site was getting four hundred thousand visitors and six million page views every day in January of this year, the fourth month of its existence. What are the chances of a multi-million dollar YouTube-style buyout anytime soon, with legitimate, brand new, post-broadcast content coming straight from the programme makers?
