CBC To Release TV-Show via BitTorrent, For Free
Written by Ernesto on March 19, 2008CBC, Canada’s public television broadcaster has plans to release the upcoming TV-show “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” for free via BitTorrent. This makes CBC the first North-American broadcaster to embrace the popular filesharing protocol.
According to an early report, high quality copies of the show will be published the day after it aired on TV, without any DRM restrictions.
CBC is not alone in this, European broadcasters, including the BBC, are currently working on a next generation BitTorrent client that will allow them to make their content available online. The benefit of BitTorrent is of course that it will reduce distribution costs.
The popularity of movies and TV-shows on BitTorrent hasn’t gone unnoticed. We reported earlier that some TV-studios allegedly use BitTorrent as a marketing tool, and others leaking unaired pilots intentionally.
It is safe to say that BitTorrent is slowly replacing Tivo. Approximately 50% of all BitTorrent downloads are TV-shows, and some episodes of popular shows such as “Lost”, “Prison Break” and “Heroes” get up to 10 million downloads per episode, spread over thousands of sites.
It is good to see that broadcasters slowly start to realize that they can benefit from sharing their content via BitTorrent. Last month Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) made the popular TV-show “Nordkalotten 365″ available in a DRM-less format. This experiment turned out to be a huge success, while the distribution costs were close to zero.
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Now if only the bloody yanks will wake up and see the light
this is awesome! way to go cbc. long time mississaugan here.
Even if there are commercials chances are they wouldn’t be as long as on tv; like with abc.com
..that shows one commercial what? 3 times?
Yes, let people waste their bandwidth on endless free-to-air TV series instead of stuff they don’t want you to. You could just get it off TV. I doubt that anyone outside of Canada would want it anyway (?) So maybe you can only videotape it, but is it really worth archiving digitally? You might only want to watch it once again, or not ever again.
Including ads would only lessen the incentive, as they can be removed when recording anyway.
I don’t see why they have a problem with Bittorrent in the first place as all these shows can be recorded legally from TV anyway.
If they ever did overcook official releases with commercials people would just revert to downloading unofficial rips. :-D
Tip ‘o the hat to Rick Mercer and whoever @ the CBC spear-headed this. I love my Ceeb. It’s what PBS would be if it wasn’t busy begging for money every second week, or the BBC if it wasn’t too busy serving Her Majesty & the Lord’s interests.
Mind you, every Conservative government since Dief (and a few Liberal ones too) has tried to move money away from the CBC. Not that it would have anything to do with their independent News service, oh nooo..
CTV has as much independence as their owners at Bell Media allow them, notatallthankyouverymuch. You might as well watch CNN or FOX news. IMO you will find no better newscast than The National with Peter Mansbridge. Excellent world coverage and fair regional representation in the coverage of the political especially. Pure CBC Gold.
But back on topic, I can’t imagine commercials being imbeded in the on-line downloads. Commercials are added by the regional affiliates, and the broadcast tapes would have only commerical que markes. No, if there’s anything at all it’ll be a CBC promo bump at the beginning or end…
As to who has previously downloaded the Rick Mercer report, I do believe aAF has released it from time to time, and it was certainly available on #DD (RIP! We all miss you still!). Being topical-humour, such as This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Daily Show, or The Colbert Report, I wouldn’t keep an archive, but I’m sure some out there will…
As for ISPs “paying the cost of this media revolution”, no, the costs will be passed onto the consumer, just as soon as enough of them make a stink about protocol-interference and traffic-shaping.
Come on.. NRK has released one of their most popular TV shows via BitTorrent in HD (1024*576) for some time now.. And they release other shows occasionally in HD as well, free of charge without commercial via BitTorrent.
ha ha ha . very funny . if it’s pay , no one will watching it
Welcome after, Canada.
~Norway
Incredible, says you. Inevitable, says I.
We’ve just made the official announcement this morning:
http://www.cbc.ca/nextprimeminister/blog/2008/03/canadas_next_great_prime_minis.html
And there will be no commercials in the torrent :)
Well, i’v never ever downloaded any TV program from the internet.
TV in brazil is only SHIT!
I rarely watch tv, so for me this news ain’t change much thing…
But it’s good to see legal company using torrent, and maybe showing others wich way they should follow.
In other news, the Swedish weather report will available daily from teh pirate bay soon. We encourage everyone to download and archive them because they’ll be of high historic value in a couple thousand years.
Never so proud to be a Canuck.
This effectively removes the argument that all torrents are illegal, and that filesharing is without redemption, to even the stupidest, most ‘tarded of the naysayers.
Now all the CBC needs is decent programming. They should take all the idiot money for CanCon crap and plow it into this and evelopment of decent shows regardless of Canadian Content. Then they’d finally be worth something to the average brain-possessing individual.
[quote comment="314137"][quote comment="314089"]
But yeah; the Prime Minister is a conservative, and decided to reduce funding for the network (something about it not being “our job” to make free TV / entertainment), so it makes sense that they would explore less expensive means of doing what they do: serving the public and paying the bills.
*for those interested, the others are CTV, Global, and in ontario TVO.[/quote]
And in the course of saving all that money, make sure as many people as possible are able to download, what has to be a tongue-in-cheek jab at the administration who cut their funding. hehe
this is good news
way to go canada!
“CTV has as much independence as their owners at Bell Media allow them, notatallthankyouverymuch. You might as well watch CNN or FOX news. IMO you will find no better newscast than The National with Peter Mansbridge. Excellent world coverage and fair regional representation in the coverage of the political especially. Pure CBC Gold.”
“CTV has as much independence as their owners at Bell Media allow them, notatallthankyouverymuch. You might as well watch CNN or FOX news. IMO you will find no better newscast than The National with Peter Mansbridge. Excellent world coverage and fair regional representation in the coverage of the political especially. Pure CBC Gold.”
Hey hiro81 here is a example of you’re “Pure CBC Gold” bowing to Chinese communist regime pressure http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/business/worldbusiness/09broadcast.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Looks like the Communist Broadcasting Centre (aka CBC) will finally have to adapt.
Too slow. The pirates will have it out before they do.
CBC has produced nothing but terrible shows, and hasn’t done anything good since Kids in the Hall.
What they need to do is fire all the old people and yuppies who work there, and hire a new staff of kids under 25.
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