CBC Televison among the first to play catch-up
CBC News has posted a story about the CBC Television decision to distribute Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister via the bittorrent p2p protocol.
Turns out a lot of downloaders were surprised to discover that Rogers and Bell shape traffic on legal downloads. Many more familiar bittorrent users were surprised to discover that CBC isn’t very adept at encoding the video properly.
One commenter writes: “They should hire a couple of 14 year olds to give them a hand. It’s really unforgivable to have problems with the encoding of a video file.”
Overall, it seems CBC was pleased with the results and that viewers were enthusiastic and supportive of the move. Some challenges, however, remain.
Although this torrent was released without ads, there is discussion about including advertising ahead. This poses a number of challenges for CBC. It’s incredibly difficult to track bittorrent users through an open distribution channel as they’re not typically receiving the content from CBC itself and the torrent might be passed beyond the initial tracker. Because of this, it will be difficult to audit viewership for advertisers using traditional metrics. (Distribution clients like Miro get around this challenge somewhat by noting subscriptions and auditing numbers through the client application.)
Traditional advertisers and their media buyers will likely continue to find it difficult to engage the transition to open distribution — which isn’t necessarily a negative development. Considering (1) consumers are demanding open distribution; (2) it’s much more cost-effective, (3) scalable, and (4) stable; and (5) it improves content competition and (6) access among traditional and nontraditional players, new financial support models will likely emerge.
The Chris Anderson-inspired global analysis of economics of “free” might help us develop and develop understand new funding and support models for content.
In the meantime, we can continue to enjoy and support the existing free culture (“free as in speech, not as in beer”) movement. CBC, now, included.
Guinevere Orvis a CBC Web Producer blogs from the inside about the CBC experiment.
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