Slashdot Mirror
British TV Station Offers Downloads
Richard W.M. Jones writes "Remember how the British just love
to download TV?
Well, British terestrial TV channel
five
has announced that it will become the
first to offer TV programmes to download legally.
Except that they don't quite seem to
get it yet. They are
offering
here some videos from
this
car programme which apparently didn't quite make
it to air, for the princely sum of
£1.50 (about $3), in DRM'd WMV 10 format
(mplayer plays them fine).
Still, it's a start, and it looks
like they're just testing the water.
Hopefully they won't take the lack of
response as 'proof' that there's no
demand.
There's
more
about this at the BBC's website."
That's not true.
In fact, here in Sweden at least, many downloaders want to pay the author of the works they download. But they do not think the prices are reasonable, thus they download. And for a DVD which sold 200,000 copies, the director got 15,000SEK (less than 2,000 USD). Which is also a cause for downloading - not enough money goes to authors.
Right now, there is actually a discussion between a director and "pirates" on Sweden's largest pro-"piracy" website. What they have reached is the points described above.
The director has proposed to hold a seminar about the film industry's future and how it can use the internet. The seminar is currently being planned.
I downloaded one of the free clips (3 mins long) and it's a whopping 896K/sec up to 1539kbps/sec VBR at 768 x 432 with 96kbps WM audio. Even if the content isn't that great, the quality is damn good. Considering they could have passed us off with some crappy res, little real media file, this is a fantastic offering.
Provided this isn't a total flop, hopefully it will lead the way for other networks to do the same which hopefully will lead to downloading whole programmes.
I thought I read a while ago that the BBC (and possibly Channel 4) were going to open up their archives for watching clips/programmes online. Anyone know what happened to that?
SVT open archive
They are still working on some IP-issues; hence no sound on most of the clips. SVT has some 200 000 hours in their archive, dating back to 1896, of which some 10 percent is digitized.
Internet Speed test
Danish television station, TV2, has been doing this for the past year or so. For rougly $80 a year, you can watch everything that TV2 has produced themselves. Works without a hitch. Requires a 2Mbit connection for full-screen watching. Tjek it out at http://sputnik.dk (in Danish, but you should be able to get the idea even though you don't speak Danish)
I will blog about your incompetence @ http://www.barelyadraft.com
in DRM'd WMV 10 format (mplayer plays them fine)
Could anyone elaborate on this?
Last I heard, mplayer could not do DRM'd WM9 files.
Will it play high-def WM9 files with DRM too?
How about the ones with "phone-home" DRM?
How about the ones on a DVD-ROM like this WMV-HD Italian Job?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
...at least to UK citizens. Remebember the BBC is already paid for by the license fee (a tax by any other name), so all of the programs made by the BBC _already belong to us_. It makes me a bit sad that the shops are full of DVDs of BBC shows retailing for £20 a go, when license payers have already paid for this show's creation.
I was in the audience for this parliamentary seminar in February where Paula Le Dieu of the BBC Creative Archives Project spoke.
Apparently the biggest problem for the BBC is figuring out how to deal with the copyright problems of background music. Almost all BBC TV programmes have background music, and almost all of that music has been licenced for TV use only, not for download over the Internet.
Until that problem is resolved, there are very few programmes that can be released via the BBC Creative Archive.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com