Norweigan State Media to begin Torrenting

[Mr Bean]

Hey! Traditional Media Corporations! Pay attention because you know someone else is going to jump on the idea and if you wait too long your looking at going the way of newspapers.
On the sidelines, out of money and ignored.
NPK blog linked statement
The "NPK" as its called is starting to torrent their shows on the internet. DRM free and in another bit it's going to not even be country locked unlike the BBC because there's no advantage except legal to let non-Norwegian's watch state TV..

Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation sets up its own bittorrent tracker

By Eirik Solheim • March 8, 2009

Information in Norwegian
Dette er en egnelsk artikkel som informerer om at NRK har satt opp sin egen BitTorrent-tracker. Noe som kan være av internasjonal interesse. Vi har også en egen artikkel som forklarer hvorfor vi av og til skriver på engelsk her på NRKbeta.

After some very successful tests through 2008 the Norwegian state broadcaster has decided to set up their own BitTorrent tracker and start offering content through this form of distribution on a more regular basis.

The tracker is based on the same OpenTracker software that the Pirate Bay has been using for the last couple of years. But it will only be used to distribute content from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).


(Photo: Eirik Solheim, Creative Commons.)

NRK is license funded and aims to reach their audience with the best possible quality. Tests with traditional download methods have proven difficult because of the large files and extreme load on the servers.

“By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we’re the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it.”


With our own tracker we will get better statistics and gather important data about how this technology works. And as we did with our early tests we’ll also try to share the knowledge as we grow this service.

The first show we’re putting on our new tracker is a very popular television series about people living in remote places in Norway. It features fascinating people and spectacular scenery. We have provided all the Norwegian subtitle files and if people want to fansub any of the episodes we’re more than happy to let you do that. Please let us know in the comments and we’ll link to your translations.
Rights issues

We are providing full quality video files with no DRM. The biggest problem regarding this project is to clear all the rights we need to be able to distribute content in such an open system. NRK is a big content producer, but record labels, actors, external production companies and format rights owners usually have contracts that prevent us from distributing our content freely in the internet. We are in constant negotiations over these issues. And it seems like it should be possible to find a solution where NRK gets the rights it needs and the rights holders get the compensation they want.

In addition to this we look into new providers. Pump Audio, Magnatune and other companies with easier licensing systems are interesting sources.

The important bit is bolded. Holy shit really? If the Pirates have a better distribution model than you do(Irregardless of price) you have a much better chance of funneling the traffic to you, rather than away.

[Phantasee]

Well, it's nice that they're not country-locking it, but mightn't that have something to do with the fact that any people watching Norwegian television outside Norway are either Norwegian ex-pats or one of a handful of people learning Norwegian? The BBC has a much larger potential market to think about, which might have led to the decision to country-lock their content.

Which is still retarded, of course.

[Mr Bean]

Well, it's nice that they're not country-locking it, but mightn't that have something to do with the fact that any people watching Norwegian television outside Norway are either Norwegian ex-pats or one of a handful of people learning Norwegian? The BBC has a much larger potential market to think about, which might have led to the decision to country-lock their content.

Which is still retarded, of course.

Which is odd considering how... ahem "good" BBC's history is of attracting syndication rights outside Britain(Not counting PBS or Dr Who). Perhaps if people knew what the BBC had for shows then they would be that much more likely to request it on their own TV channels?

Even if they follow the South Park model(All shows online you can watch news shows the day off, the day after then they take it down for a month or two and put it back online) they'd stand a much better chance of getting buzz. It would not be the first time a show got syndication outside it's home country after Internet buzz proved to executive there was an audience for it.