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Canadian TV to Adopt DRM-Free BitTorrents

Posted by Zonk on from the would-love-that-from-pbs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Canada's public broadcast network, CBC, is to adopt DRM free BitTorrent distribution of one of its major primetime shows, Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. The effort has already been hailed by Canadian copyright guru Michael Geist, who expects the decision to add fuel to Canada's net neutrality debate. A CBC producer behind the show told CNET that the motivation for the move was that CBC 'wanted the show to be as accessible as possible to as many Canadians as possible, in the format that they want it in.' As for DRM, she said 'I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it.' She added that 'if it's bad for the consumers, its bad for the company.'"

6 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. throttling from bell and rogers by jmcnaught · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hopefully this means that Bell and Rogers will both have to stop throttling Bittorrent downloads. Some days on rogers I would get faster downloads on dialup.

    1. Re:throttling from bell and rogers by esaul · · Score: 5, Informative

      Fortunately, as opposed to the US, you do not have to solely depend on large ISPs as Bell, Videotron or Rogers. Remember this story? There are dozens of independent ISPs, and while they often use Bell's networks, I have not seen any throttling on P2P as of yet. I routinely get speeds of close to 500KB/s.

    2. Re:throttling from bell and rogers by BForrester · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm on Rogers, and it works for me. If there are sufficient seeders and peers, I regularly get up to 600 KB / sec on regular high-speed, up from 20 KB / sec without.

      Make sure you're using a non-standard port. Also, don't force encryption, just enable it. That will net you encrypted traffic + whatever low level of throttled traffic your ISP allows.

  2. Finally, someone gets it. by Jax+Omen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The best way to make money in the long term is to have happy customers. Period. Now if only some US companies would learn that...

  3. Re:No Offense by Drooling+Iguana · · Score: 5, Informative

    We've been awesome for nearly a century and a half. People just didn't start noticing until now.

    --
    ... I'm addicted to placebos
  4. CBC - It's Publicly funded by usedtolosing · · Score: 5, Informative

    Keep in mind folks.

    The good 'ole CBC is a publicly funded crown corp. So yeah, if they want to cut out a revenue stream...go for it...but we're paying for it in taxes.

    It's a novel experiment, and I love the idea. But I'm not sure that this exact model would work for a Private US broadcaster or private Canadian Broadcaster.

    Keep in mind. PBS has had documentary downloads available forever. PBS Frontline.