shiny dot bulletin

Thank you, you are an inspiration to me. Perhaps with your worthy example the television industry will smarten up and embrace this technology and use it to *everyone’s* advantage.

The music industry blindly chose to fight and are only now trying to catch up in largely futile ways, many of which I’ve written about here.

Cheers to your success!

From last100.com:

Inside story: the making of a legal TV ‘torrent’
by Guinevere Orvis
March 26th, 2008

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own and not those of CBC/Radio-Canada.

Inside story: the making of a legal TV ‘Torrent’Last week, CBC released an official DRM-free BitTorrent of a prime time show– a first for a major north American broadcaster (see last100 coverage). Since then we’ve been getting hundreds of emails of support and one clear resounding message: give us more. This begs the question (sic), why aren’t broadcasters doing more? Why in the year 2008, seven years after BitTorrent’s birth and a lifetime in Internet years is this a groundbreaking thing? Let’s break down what it takes to get a legal torrent going and maybe we’ll get some answers.

The idea
First, the seed has to get planted. How it happened for us was when two weeks ago, Tessa Sproule (the head of digital strategy of CBC’s Factual Entertainment department) read this post on BoingBoing about how Norway’s public broadcaster had tested the BitTorrent waters and declared them warm & refreshing. Tessa decided she wanted to spearhead the effort for CBC to follow NRK’s lightly treaded path. Unfortunately, not every company has a Tessa. Companies need to have people championing new ideas, or watch their product slowly become irrelevant in favour of products from companies who are willing to innovate.

Still, how do you make it happen? When the average person wants to share a show torrent, they simply record it off TV, strip out the commercials and upload it. But when a media company decides to do it and wants to do it in a completely legal way, there’s a lot more that has to be considered. Let’s start with ownership.

Ownership
In big business, it can be challenging to start something completely new to an organization. Usually it involves convincing lots of people that your idea is brilliant and simply must be tried. Now try convincing people who you don’t even work with, at several different companies, maybe in different countries, all with different mandates. Impossible? Well, no… it’s technically possible in the same way that it’s technically possible that I’m going to win the lottery six times in a row. But, we can certainly hedge our bets a bit better by starting with something we own, or own with very few partners.

Read the full story.

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