MUMBAI: The US television industry is pushing a legislation that would scramble TV content, making swapping impossible. No one has been sued for putting TV shows online yet.

With millions of unauthorised media files being traded on the Internet these days, viewers never wait for the re-runs of their favourite shows as they can download the shows from the Internet and watch it at their convenience.

Observers point out that there has been a big increase for new sites that specialise in trading TV shows. The Simpsons, Friends and The Sopranos are some of the popular shows readily available at file-sharing programs like Kazaa and new sites such as eDonkey, TVTorrents.com and Bucktv.net.

Nearly 20,000 files of popular TV shows are available free of cost on the web, reported BayTSP, a Silicon Valley company that tracks unauthorised Internet file trading. There were even cases of Internet beating TV as the first medium to expose a show to the audience, noted the company.