Azureus Partners with the BBC to Sell TV Shows
Written by Smaran on December 19, 2006The popular BitTorrent client, Azureus has just struck a deal with the BBC to offer TV shows on its recently launched content store/website, Zudeo.
Zudeo is Azureus’ new video sharing website and content store. It implements many ‘Web 2.0′ features like the ability to rate content, leave comments, share torrents and links to submit content to popular social bookmarking sites like digg.
The BBC will sell the following shows on Zudeo:
Red Dwarf, Strange, Invasion Earth, Little Britain, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Coupling, Keeping Up Appearances, League of Gentlemen and Ideal.
Ironically, British customers will not be able to purchase any of the shows as they will only be available to U.S. customers. The rest of the world is going to have to wait for now. One of the BBC’s most popular shows, The Office is missing from the list.
The Zudeo site has also lost the ‘beta’ tag and seems to be ready for the primetime. I had the chance to use the Mac OS X client (still in beta). It is polished, light, launches quickly and really seems like a ready product. The content store looks similar to the iTunes Store and is relatively easy to navigate. The Zudeo client is different from the normal Azureus app, although it has the same name. It also appears to no longer be Open Source, we were unable to find the source code of it on Sourceforge. The last recorded entry in the changelog is 2.5.0.0.
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14 Responses
It is still open source, no “build” has been made for the Zudeo / 3.0 source yet, but anyone can access it from the CVS repository…
Sweet!
No Top Gear?!?! Smeg…
EMA
A list of shows we’d REALLY like to see offered:
Later w/Jools Holland
Shameless
Peep Show
Extras
Planet Earth
Galapagos
Mark Steel Lectures
Howard Goodall
Red Dwarf is already out of video several times over. Let’s see some of the stuff we can’t get over here due to DVD region restrictions and PAL video format.
Why is it only the British do irony properly?
What’s ironic is that British customers have already bought the damn shows through the legal obligation to own a television license. We pay for the BBC, we pay for the shows, they’re ours already.
What’s also ironic is that if every Brit had a digital copy of the content that they’ve paid to produce the seed number would be sky high and download times would be way down low, encouraging more people to buy the content, and thus reducing the cost of next years license fee (fat chance, but I can dream).
the source is here:
http://azureus.cvs.sourceforge.net/azureus/azureus3/
I’m using Azureus to get Torchwood now; I’d be more than happy to pay for the privilege, as long as the content is useable and ad free.
Why not selling to the UK public?
Actually – in the UK we have to pay a licence fee for those programmes to be made at all, so we Brits should get them for free, rather than effectively paying for them twice.
I think the Mighty Boosh should be offered as well…that show is amazing. Unsung hero.
blame the BBC for that one, i bet its part of their requirements for azureus to use it
Why not selling to Australia?
I use AZUREUS for Doctor Who and Torchwood, and would love to pay per episode and not look over my shoulder, and if the Yanks come in I would love to buy season 2 Ugly Betty, Plus Stargate, etc..
Australian TV STINKS, adverts every few mins, rubbish program’s, hardly ever on advertised time. FOXTEL our cable monopoly is worse
AZUREUS has fixed that for me, Zudeo could make me honest.
Execuse mee plees for vis messaga posted from Norenbergen Shutgorto blin…
Hhgghhg kdfgdg sdgfgt sd gdsgdgsdg gd sdgdgsdg
장된 페이지’는 웹을 검색한 당시의 문서 상태를 보여 드립니다. 있습니다. 하이라이트 색깔표시 없이
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