The site tracked BitTorrent downloads for two Fox shows — Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef — over the last week, when the delay began. Sure enough, during the first five days, downloads of the latest Hell’s Kitchen episode rose by 114 percent compared to the previous three episodes. Downloads of MasterChef spiked by 189 percent, with the season’s finale likely accounting for higher demand on BitTorrent.

TorrentFreak also took note of some of the angry comments on Hulu, many of them wrongly directed at Hulu rather than Fox: “What I don’t like is up until now I have been able to watch the episode of Hell’s Kitchen the day after it airs and all of a sudden they now want me to pay for it?” one commenter writes.

Unless Fox executives are really, really dense, they had to see this coming. My guess is that an uptick in piracy was expected, but in the long run, Fox is hoping that people will feel inconvenienced enough by the delay to hang onto their cable subscriptions — or sign up for Hulu Plus. Fox is openly concerned about cord-cutting, and delaying shows by eight days is meant to discourage people from relying on free streaming.

In other words, it’s about reinforcing the idea that if you want Fox’s content in a timely manner, you’re going to have to pay for it. TorrentFreak’s findings don’t necessarily mean that Fox’s approach is doomed, but they are a reminder that workarounds are always available.

In short, the TV remote matters–and it’s it worth pausing to remember some of the most significant models to appear since 1950, plus a not-so-significant curiosity or two. (Click on the images below to see the ads, patents, and magazine pages at a much larger size.)

Lazy, indeed. In 1950, Zenith introduced America to the whole mindbending idea of controlling a TV from across the room. It did so with a remote with an inspired name: Lazy Bones. (Too bad it didn’t catch on as a generic term for the entire category.) Lazy Bones only let you change the station. And it’s not clear in this ad, but it was a wired remote. Even that was a mighty appealing concept –and wired remotes lasted at least into the 1980s. (My first VCR had one.)  

Shoot your TV. Five years later, Zenith rendered Lazy Bones obsolete with Flash-Matic, its first wireless remote. It resembled a Buck Rogers ray-gun, and people using it in ads looked alarmingly like they were zapping their TV sets. But it was pretty much just a flashlight: you performed different functions by aiming it at different corners of the screen. One of its innovations: you could use it to mute the audio, which Zenith promoted as being a great antidote to pesky commercials.

Sound Off! In 1956, Zenith tried yet another technology: ultrasound. Using a Clapper-like approach, the Space Command emitted clicks which were picked up by a mike inside the TV. One catch: Other high-pitched sounds, such as a dog tag’s jingle, sometimes switched channels. This 1960 ad shows a swanky couple in a swanky room watching a swanky lady on a swanky TV with the wondrous Glare-Ban feature. (The set sold for $575, or $4200 in 2011 dollars). 

The wide world of remotes. In the mid-fifties, TV makers were still figuring out what a remote should look like and what features it should have, as shown in this illustration from Popular Mechanics. Dumont (upper left) gave its one a telephone-like rotary dial. Emerson (lower left) thought it should have a built-in speaker. Motorola (lower right) opted for Apple-like minimalism with its one-button model. And that’s an early Zenith Space Command at upper right.

Remotely portable. At first, the very fact that a television had a remote control of any sort was a sure sign it was a high-end model. By 1959, the technology began to work its way down to lower-priced, more mainstream models–such as the “portable” sets being hefted by the alarmingly perky young folks in this RCA Victor ad. The sets came with RCA’s Wireless Wizard remotes, and sold for as little as $149.95. (That’s $1100 in today’s dollars–but still cheap for a 1959 TV.)

Being digital. Early remotes made you movie through channels one station at a time, in sequential rather than random-access fashion. Which was fine if you only got a few channels. But Magnavox’s 1974 model added a major new feature: a keypad. You could punch the buttons to go directly to any channel, and (apparently humongous) numbers showed you which channel you were on. This miracle of channel-hopping goodness set the standard for every TV remote that followed.

Simply infrared. In 2011, infrared technology is mundane. Very, very mundane. Back in 1977, however, it was a big deal that warranted a Popular Mechanics story, since it didn’t suffer from the irritating tendency of ultrasonic remotes to respond to noises other than TV watchers clicking their clickers. Infrared got the job done–and became such a dirt-cheap commodity that there’s hardly a gizmo in existence that would benefit from a remote that doesn’t come with one. 

Woz’s other breakthrough. You know and love Steve Wozniak as cofounder of Apple and the engineering virtuoso behind the the Apple II. Less known: He was a key figure in remote-controi history, having cofounded CL 9, the company that invented the universal remote. Its $200 CORE trainable remote debuted in 1987; this drawing is from its patent filing. Like the Apple II, CORE packed a 6502 CPU; it was kind of geeky and didn’t catch on. But its descendants are legion.

Nerdly wonder. What if a designer of pocket calculators was forced at gunpoint to design a remote control? He’d probably come up with something along the lines of Radio Shack’s 1991 $99 eight-in-one universal model. Like Woz’s CORE, it could be trained to mimic any remote and let users set up macros to trigger sequences of events at particular times. It too was apparently too techy for the average consumer; the Shack didn’t sell them for long. I had one and adored it.

Interactivism. The media business keeps inventing interactive TV over and over–anyone remember QUBE?–without consumers ever quite buying into it. The idea usually involves a fancy-schmancy remote. In 1992, Popular Mechanics reported on Interactive Network’s trials in Northern California, which involved this remote with buttons, a big LCD–and a built-in dial-up modem. It let folks do stuff like play along with Wheel of Fortune.

Patently silly. As with tech products of all sorts, the history of the remote control is rife with fresh, original approaches to an old idea that got patented–and then preceded to go absolutely nowhere. The fellow in the patent drawing here–he looks awfully comfortable–is using a rather scary-looking joystick with a numeric keypad and a bunch of other miscellaneous buttons. Naturally, its inventor said that it was a particularly ergonomic design.

Mr. Peanut. The TiVo remote may the most iconic new-and-impoved remote control of its era–it’s synonymous not only with TiVo itself, but with user-friendly consumer-electronics interfaces in general. And yet, it’s not that dramatic a rethinking of the remote. It’s just that the shape is appealing and the buttons are thoughtfully arranged and well-labled. There’s a lesson there for everyone who’s attempted to radically rethink the remote over the years.

Peace and harmony. When the first Harmony remote–not yet a Logitech product–debuted in 2001, it brought with it the most powerful new idea in TV remote-control in years. Rather than forcing you to train it or relying on a stale list of supported remotes, this universal remote could be connected to a computer via USB cable and programmed over the Internet–letting it support a near-infinite list of consumer-electronics products, with no guesswork required.

Circular thinking. Hillcrest Labs’ The Loop looks like another whacko, ill-advised alternative remote that never left the drawing board. But it is indeed for sale, and having used one, I’m…kind of impressed. Strictly speaking, this vaguely Wiimote-esque device (which you grasp like a brass ring) is as much mouse as remote–it’s intended for use with PCs that have been hooked up to TVs. Side benefits: it would look good on a coffee table, and would be tough to lose behind sofa cushions.

QWERTYmania. When photos of Sony’s super-sized, remote for its Google TV-equipped sets leaked, some people wondered if they were a twisted joke. Nope. I find it oddly touching that Sony (and others, like the Boxee Box folk) have attempted to design the remote of the future by reaching back to Christopher Sholes’ QWERTY typewriter keyboard layout of the late 19th century. If the inventors of Zenith’s Lazy Bones could see this, they might dismiss it as objectionably old-fashioned.

Ditch your clicker. Today, if you were building the perfect remote, you might give it a color touch screen, a rich user interface, Wi-Fi connectivity, and content downloaded from the Internet. But why bother to build it when you’re already carrying that hardware–in the form of your smartphone? Peel is a slick iPhone add-on that does just that, with mostly pleasing results. It and other phone-based remotes suggest that the true remote of the future may be no remote at all.

So what remote controls do you love–or love to hate?

So did the drop–the first one in two decades–happen because people are watching Internet TV in lieu of old-fashioned cable or terrestrial TV? Nielsen says it’s a factor, but it stresses another (distressing) one: low-income households which can’t afford TVs, especially after the digital transition rendered old analog sets useless without an adapter.

Cord-cutting is sometimes dismissed as a myth. And it’s true that no data shows TV watchers fleeing to the net in massive numbers just yet. But I feel in my bones that an awful lot of people are going to do so over the next few years–it’s just a matter of how many and how quickly. I mean, wouldn’t there have been a time in the 1990s when any study would have showed that only a tiny group of folks were listening to MP3s instead of CDs? And wouldn’t it have been a mistake to conclude then that this digital-music stuff wasn’t going to amount to much?

(Photo by Flickr user avlxyz)

In the time before President Obama made his address, I mostly watched NBC News and CNN. Nobody who wasn’t involved in the operation knew much about it at this point, so the anchors on these channels mostly tapdanced to fill time. They told us, over and over again, that this was huge news. (Really?) But they didn’t even ask many of the questions I was asking–such as “how about al-Zawahiri?”–let alone attempt to answer them. The screen was full of talking heads, but they were saying very little.

Even after the president spoke, the analysis seemed thin–I didn’t hear anything as smart as, say, James Fallows’ impressions over at the Atlantic.

TV coverage thrives when it can show something, and this news was about an event it couldn’t show. The one thing that it showed that was worth seeing were the crowds at Ground Zero, the White House, and elsewhere.

The TV analysis got better as the night went on, but it took surprisingly long for that to happen. By the time it did, some of the continuous coverage wasn’t so continuous anymore. (NBC, for instance, went back to the more weighty matters of Celebrity Apprentice.)

Between blogs and news sites, the Web was far more adept at reacting to yesterday’s developments. And some of the TV coverage that’s worth watching is traveling from TV to Web: for instance, I just watched ABC News’s footage inside the compound, but I did so in embedded form on a blog.

(I also used Twitter and Facebook last night; in fact, I learned about the news from Twitter, before CNN.com mentioned it on its home page.)

TV does retain some advantages over the Web for these kinds of events:

• It’s effortless. You can turn on a channel and just consume information. The Web’s far richer, but it involves bopping about, finding items, and processing information–the opposite of sitting back and being a News Potato.
• It can be communal. Multiple people can sit in front of a TV together, watching and discussing what they see. You aren’t going to crowd around a blog post with your loved ones.

Virtues like that are one reason why I’m still dithering about whether to cut the cord or not. But from now on, I won’t reflexively argue that TV does continuous breaking news better than the Web; I’ll remember yesterday night, when it didn’t.

(Full disclosure: as part of Technologizer’s business relationship with TIME.com, we’re technically part of the CNN.com network.)

Although doomsday predictions can be dangerous for any technology, I’ll gladly join the chorus of people who think the remote should be put out to pasture. But before that can happen, a lot of things need to change in the phone and TV industries, all of which will take a very long time.

As the Times points out, smartphone users need to be mindful of battery, given that today’s best handsets don’t last much longer than a full day. Until battery life is a non-issue for powerful phones, they won’t be ideal as remote controls.

The logistics of smartphone ownership also pose a problem. Dedicated TV remotes can be used by anyone, but if Mom’s the only one with a smartphone that controls the television, it’s back to the old remote for everyone else if she leaves the room or takes a call. Smartphones can’t fully replace the remote unless all TV users have one. (Comscore says roughly one sixth of the U.S. population owns a smartphone now.)

The actual television and set-top boxes are still the biggest hurdles. You can use an iPhone as a universal remote today, but not without a clunky IR dongle like this $50 accessory from L5. Add one for each TV or each phone, and the smartphone universal remote becomes an expensive investment. The other option is for networked devices to start including their own apps, to be controlled by Wi-Fi. Samsung and Mitsubishi are working on smartphone apps for their televisions, the Times reports, and you can already use a smartphone to control Google TV, Apple TV, Sonos, iTunes and more. But then you’re dealing with a patchwork of apps, with spotty support across major smartphone platforms.

In other words, the smartphone remote control, in its current state, can be just as clumsy as the remote from your cable company. It just looks nicer.

Last Gadget Standing nominee: Gefen Auto Volume Stabilizer

Price: $299

Ever notice how TV commercials and movie trailers are decibels louder than the shows? If so, you’ll appreciate Gefen’s use of Dolby Volume Technology to level the volume on TV programs and commercials for a consistent audio experience. A simple solution for home entertainment systems, this tiny device automatically equalizes audio from different sources so everything is heard at the same audio levels. Channel surfers will appreciate the stability.  And music listeners will enjoy a consistent level of volume when enjoying random CDs.  The Auto Volume Stabilizer incorporates Dolby 5.1 digital decoding and converting to 2-channel audio. It also supports both digital (TOSlink; S/PDIF) and analog (L/R) audio formats. It will work with most popular home entertainment devices on the market, including television sets, A/V receivers, CD players, DVD players and more. Multiple audio sources can be connected at the same time, and accessed with the included IR remote or a tiny selector on the device used to switch between sources.

In 1939, the mere idea of pictures traveling through the air was exciting and demanded a technical walkthrough.

The problem with modern ads for tech products is they so rarely involve singing apes.

At first, the idea of an early color TV ad being in black and white was weird. Then I thought about it and realized it would have been weirder if it had been in color.

Warning: DON’T WATCH THIS ONE. You won’t be able to get the song out of your head for 24-36 hours.

When this bit was filmed, remote controls were such a new idea that it took five minutes to enumerate their wonders (and even the “off” button needed to be explained).

In 1959, it was considered perfectly normal for TV engineers to wear bowties to work.

There was a time when busted TV tubes were a major source of domestic woe, and smart consumers insisted on RCA replacement tubes.

This could probably be remade today as an ad for 3D TVs.

This TV doesn’t look all that portable to me.

I’m not sure what “computer crafted color” is, but it sounds impressive.

In 1971, lack of vacuum tubes was a major selling point.

I’m ashamed to confess that I wasn’t sure whether RCA still made TVs until I checked. It does. But it’s now a phantom brand that’s licensed to an unspecified third-party manufacturer by its owner, French-based Technicolor (which hasn’t bothered to update the RCA site to stop using the parent company’s old name, Thomson). I’m not sure whether RCA TVs are ever advertised on TV these days, but I’m pretty sure there are no current RCA commercials as entertaining as these ones…