CBC To Release TV-Show via BitTorrent, For Free
CBC, 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.
Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent
Following closely on the heels of Norway, Canada's public broadcasting service is adopting DRM-free BitTorrent distribution for a major prime-time show.
On March 24, CBC will use BitTorrent to distribute this year's broadcast of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. This will make Canada the first country in North America to release high-quality, DRM-free copies of a prime-time show using the popular P2P file-sharing technology.
Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, an annual competition in which young adults propose ways to improve the country in hopes of winning 50,000 Canadian dollars, attracted more than 1 million viewers in 2007. While broadcast shows in the United States regularly reach more than 8 million viewers, for a Canadian broadcast program, 1 million is a huge success.
:source: Source: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-989...?tag=nefd.lede
Re: Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent
Re: Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent
Re: Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent
They understood everything.
Re: Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent
Great news for us Canadians :)
Re: Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent
My apologies to lsw0794 , I see I'm a day late and a dollar short . :whistling
Re: Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent
Props to CBC for trying a new approach.
Re: Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent
Yeah Canada!
If only it wasn't "Canada's Next Great Prime Minister",everyone is going to think we're jerks.While their at it how about something with Ben Mulroney.
Re: Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent
this is good news, do we know if they're starting their own tracker for these shows, or will they up them on a pre-existing pub like TPB?