A broadcatcher was originally a term created in the 1920s for someone who listened in to radio broadcasts, as the winner in a competition run by The Daily News paper in Britain, published on 16 February 1923.
Stewart Brand later used the term independently in his 1987 book The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT to describe artificial-intelligence technology (in one application) to assist content selection ('hunting') and viewing ('grazing' or 'browsing').
Programmer Andrew Grumet announced the release of a beta version of an RSS and BitTorrent integration tool for the Radio Userland news aggregator here.
Perhaps the most popular use of broadcatching is using a BitTorrent client with inbuilt RSS support to automatically download television episodes[citation needed] as they are 'released'—internet users capture the broadcast as it is transmitted, then transcode it (typically after removing advertisements) and send it on to others.
As of 2010[update], there has been no legal action taken against sharers of TV episodes (compared to distribution of copyrighted movies and music which the MPAA and RIAA have taken a strong stance against).