Remember how we told you that Fox was planning to create a larger delay in their online programming available to non-paid Hulu and Fox.com users? Well as you might have expected the people that are not “subscribers”, you know the ones that are being forced to wait longer, are now downloading these same programs from Torrent and other file sharing sites.

Right after the original announcement, which was designed (according to Fox) to improve their “authenticated” subscribers viewing experience, there was quite an uproar over the delay. Many felt that it was not about improving anything more than Fox’s revenue. After all no matter the delay the cable and satellite viewers are still getting the same experience.

Of course the timing is important as well, many online viewers are disappointed with the available content services right now. Netflix is raising their rates and managed to kick Windows Media Center and other non-web users off their service for a couple of days. All of this is going on while the ISPs are planning to cap the amount of data you can download each month. It makes us wonder about the state of online content. There seems to be a decided effort to push people away from online content and back to the cable and satellite services. The sad part is that this won’t work, but it will give the content providers and ISPs more ammunition to put restrictions, filters and worse on the internet. The same thing is going to happen with the Anon issue. The more we see this happen the more the powers that be can point to these things and say “see, we told you”.

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