During a time in which 'The Pirate Bay trial' is almost daily news, Norwegian public broadcaster NRK announced it will start its own BitTorrent tracker to distribute content. NRK thereby clearly underlines P2P technology can be put to good legal use.
"Visionary, but no surprise"
EBU's Franc Kozamernik has been involved in P2P studies and trials for several years now and described the move as "visionary, but no surprise". What he meant with this is that NRK is continuing its pro-active approach to use cutting-edge technology for content distribution. At the EBU P2P Delivery Seminar 2008, NRK's Marius Arnesen already reported on NRK's P2P trials. He then clearly expressed the wish to do more. Yesterday's NRK announcement fits perfectly with that and could be a good example for other broadcasters.
| High quality, low costs
By using OpenTracker (the name of the tracker used by both NRK and the Pirate Bay), the broadcaster will be able to provide high quality media files to its audience with a fraction of the normal distribution costs. By doing it themselves, instead of relying on third parties, NRK hopes to gain valuable statistics.
The approach is not only open in terms of distribution (no DRM is used), but NRK also encourages people to for example provide additional translations to their programmes, offering to link to the audience-generated subtitles. |  |
Rights
As Marius already expressed at the EBU event, rights issues form the biggest obstacle for this kind of distribution. Even NRK self-produced content can be blocked by the (presumed) interests of record labels, actors, format owners, etc. This effect is seen all over the world, but NRK is optimistic about overcoming the hurdles for more and more of its material.