UKNova

» see uknova.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

UKNova started in 2003 with a soap opera. BBC America dropped EastEnders that year, and the expats who missed it first had tapes mailed over from home. "After initially sending VHS tapes across the Atlantic, a daring foray into the unknown world of trackers and torrents was made," a site operator told TorrentFreak in 2016, "and uknova.com was born." The banner on the 2004 site read "Bringing You The Finest of UK Television". It grew into a private BitTorrent tracker for British television and radio, and it kept its membership capped on purpose at between 30,000 and 40,000 accounts.

On the evening of 26 August 2012 the operators posted a notice: "UKNova is being forced to change. We have been issued with a 'cease and desist' order by FACT." Earlier that month the Federation Against Copyright Theft had seen the owner of the link site SurfTheChannel sentenced to four years in prison, and the UKNova staff had families and careers to think about. The trackers were switched off the next day, 27 August. The forums stayed open.

In 2013 a group of members rebuilt the tracker as a new site under the old name, kept deliberately quiet, with the same rules as before. It lasted three years. The trackers went offline for good in the first week of August 2016 and the whole site was closed a week later. "It's been a good long run," the closing statement said.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the not allowed list ~

UKNova's audience was people homesick for British television, and I was in Turkey with no Britain to be homesick for. What I can read is the rulebook, which was stricter than anything the big public indexes of those years bothered with. Only UK-produced programs were allowed, and only while nobody was selling them. The staff kept a long Not Allowed List of shows that were out on DVD or running on pay channels, and coverage of a series often stopped before its final episode because a box set was coming. Members could not even mention in the forums where commercial material might be found.

The community around the tracker had a radio station and an IRC channel, and it held picnics and an annual awards ceremony. When the forums got busy enough to strain the servers, members saw an error page that read "Mind The Gap". The operators count at least four marriages that began there. Relations with the BBC were friendly enough that, by the site's own account, someone at the corporation once asked UKNova to help find a missing recording of the documentary series Horizon.

~ all links are infringing ~

The cease and desist listed FACT's member companies. A site administrator told TorrentFreak that one was "one very big UK satellite provider" and another was a football production company, and that the major British broadcasters were not members and were not mentioned. UKNova removed everything connected to those two and asked FACT to point out what else offended. The answer was that "ALL links or access to content provided by UKNova are infringing" unless the site could prove explicit permission from each copyright holder. By the operators' account no television station had complained in nine years. The site ran on donations, in its later years mostly from its own staff, and had no money for a courtroom.

~ the low-profile years ~

The 2013 relaunch kept the promise never to carry anything that was on sale, and that promise is what closed it. When the first UKNova opened there was no iPlayer, and a program that left the air was gone until the broadcaster chose to repeat it. By 2016 the BBC had its own download shop, BBC Store, and Amazon Video was selling British series. A site operator said this meant "allowable content was shrinking daily". The forums slowed down with it. "Rather than flogging a dead horse," the operator said, it seemed right to close.

BBC Store shut down on 1 November 2017, fifteen months after the tracker it had helped make pointless. In the same month that UKNova closed, FACT and the police intellectual property unit PIPCU shut down a paid IPTV service aimed at British citizens living abroad. By the police's count it had many thousands of customers.

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