I’ve been a fan of Easynews for downloading Usenet binaries (i.e. images, sounds, videos) for a while now. Their interface is completely ugly, but they have the best retention rates, community, search capabilities, and thumbnailing of videos that I have ever seen. And they are only US$9.98 per “month”/20GB.
However, it looks like this new usenet provider Guba has entered the market in a big way. Their interface is slick, their site is covered with marketing-speak, but it’s pretty hard for me to trust a Usenet provider that doesn’t even mention how long their retention rates are. These people look a little sketchy to me (as Usenet goes 
), but their recent announcement that they will automatically transcode their videos to iPod video shows they have a very flexible platform. They would be a great way to get content on your iPod for the morning commute. And if you don’t mind paying more per month: US$14.95 
As a quick test of the two providers, I tried the same search for images of “Tricia Helfer” on Easynews and Guba (screenshots below). Easynews found 64 results, while Guba only found 12. However, I was using Guba’s public search interface so I don’t know how accurate those results are.
Whatever usenet provider you choose (and once again, I highly recommend Easynews), I guarantee it will be a better, safer, faster alternative to Bittorrent. Heck, Usenet has been around for almost 20 years! 
GUBA now offers the first-ever capability to watch videos from Usenet, automatically transcode those videos directly into the correct iPod video format and to seamlessly download them into iTunes to sync with the iPod. iPod support was initially planned to launch at the end of November, but was accelerated as a result of demand from GUBA’s thousands of paying customers.
GUBA is an enhanced service for searching, downloading, and viewing terabytes of rich media content from ‘the dark web.’ The dark web includes Usenet, an integral part of the Internet whose multimedia content is not indexed by the major search engines such as Yahoo, Google or Microsoft.
VS.
[...] I talked about Easynews a couple years ago, and later, their competition from Guba. Basically, Usenet is a discussion system that’s been around almost as long as the Web and is mirrored across thousands of servers around the world. Some years back, people figured out how to post binary files (i.e. images, movies, and programs) on it by converting the bits of the file into words, posting them in the discussion groups, then distributing programs to reassemble them into files. This has reached a new level with Easynews. [...]