CBC to Offer Prime-Time Show on BitTorrent

Will be the first time a North American broadcaster tells the audience to "download, share, and burn to your heart's desire" a TV show using P2P.

Things are getting interesting up North and I'm not talking about the latest in Hockey news.

For years we've heard about how P2P and file-sharing services - BitTorrent in particular - are detrimental to the future of the entertainment industry. Execs from TV broadcasters and movie studios alike regularly parade before lawmakers and anyone else who'll listen with tales about how file-sharing causes unemployment and funds the criminal enterprises of drug dealers and terrorists.

Well now the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the country's national public radio and TV broadcaster, has decided to take a new approach to P2P by using BitTorrent to distribute DRM-free digital copies of the upcoming show Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. They're even encouraging people to “download, share & burn to your heart's desire.” The show airs this Sunday, March 24th, and high-resolution version will be available for download the very next day.

"We think it's a very unique project," said Julie Bristow, director of factual entertainment. "We're experimenting with putting this show out there and putting it back into people's hands."

The show is apparently allows contestants to suggest ways to improve the country in exchange for a shot at a $50,000 prize fund. I've never heard of the show personally, but it's an important development nonetheless.

For as s University of Ottawa law professor and net neutrality proponent Michael Geist points out, "It represents a progressive approach to the way CBC treats its content and it's exactly the kind of approach a public broadcaster should be taking." Being a public broadcaster the CBC should be doing all it can to make its content freely and quickly available to the Canadian people it is intended to serve and represent.

Geist writes in a blog posting:

This development is important not only because it shows that Canada's public broadcaster is increasingly willing to experiment with alternative forms of distribution, but also because it may help crystallize the net neutrality issue in Canada.

The CBC's mandate, as provided in the Broadcasting Act, requires it to make its programming "available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and
efficient means." Using BitTorrent allows the CBC to meet its statutory mandate, yet with ISPs such as Rogers engaging in non-transparent traffic shaping, millions of Canadians may be unable to fully access programming funded by tax dollars. If the CBC experiment is successful, look for more broadcasters to do the same and for the
CRTC to face mounting pressure to address net neutrality concerns.

Guinevere Orvis, a producer for the show, has said that she believes that “DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realise it,” and that the decision to make the show available with no technical limitations was due to a desire for the show to be “as accessible as possible, to as many Canadians as possible, in the format that they want it in.”

The show will be encoded into several different formats – including the inevitable iPod version – and initially seeded from a CBC-hosted server. Interestingly, the corporation will not be filtering on IP geolocation – anyone in the world is welcome to download the show free of charge. Ironically, users over here in the UK might find it easier
to grab than Canadians will, with the major Canadian ISP Rogers Internet filtering BitTorrent traffic and preventing P2P downloads from completing.

The only problem with the plan lies with ISPs who have decided to throttle the BitTorrent protocol to conserve network bandwidth. "They're not going to distinguish between CBC and non-CBC content over BitTorrent," Mr. Geist said. "You have a public broadcaster whose mandate to distribute content as widely and efficient as possible [is] being undermined by non-transparent
policies from Canada's Internet providers."

Whether this experiment works or not remains to be seen, but one things for sure and that's that the CBC is heeding its mandate to serve the Canadian public by working to make content more freely and readily available than before.

Does anybody know how to say "bravo" in Canadian?