Blip changed their T&C. Where it previously worked, they were returning errors when our viewers wanted to watch our shows. This was our content and we had copies of the content, just not with the funky file names that blip created when encoding our content. Blip support wasn’t helpful in resolving the issue. So we wanted to batch download from blip.tv and were looking at the daunting task of using their web interface to download literally hundreds of shows one by one.

It turns out that there is an ez way to batch download content from blip.tv. You need to use the terminal application on your Mac. Then find the blip show’s rss feed, which will be a URL. Then use these three lines at the terminal — replacing show.rss.feed.url with the show’s actual rss URL.

wget show.rss.feed.url
awk ‘BEGIN{RS=FS}/^url/{print $2}’ FS='”‘ show.rss.feed.url > show.txt
wget -i show.txt

36 hours and 94.4 gigs later…all our blip are belong to us. It sort of turns blip into a free video backup service.