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Canadian Broadcaster Embraces P2P Distribution

  • BBC News, Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11 AM
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has raised eyebrows this week by releasing a high-resolution version of the season finale of "Canada's Next Great Prime Minister," a political reality TV program, on the peer-to-peer file-sharing network BitTorrent, hours after its broadcast, and without copy protection. The show's other interactive offerings included YouTube auditions and a Facebook group, but the BitTorrent move surprised many because most broadcasters regard P2P networks as their worst enemy.

It meant that the public could now download, copy, and share the popular program without any restrictions. BBC columnist Michael Geist, who applauded the move, points out that it also marked the first time a North American broadcaster had released a prime-time program with the intent that it be copied and distributed over the Internet without any kind of controls.

The idea comes from Scandinavia, where the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp. last month used BitTorrent to distribute "Nordkalotten 365," one of the country's most popular programs--an experiment that resulted in tens of thousands of downloads, all at almost no cost to the broadcaster. Elsewhere, the European Union has launched a research project that aims to create the "next generation Internet television distribution system" by leveraging P2P technologies. As Guinevere Orvis, one of the producers of the CBC show, said: "DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it."

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