Eirikso from NRK, the Norwegian public broadcast, writes to tell us that they've set up their own BitTorrent tracker, adding, "The tracker is based on the same OpenTracker software that the Pirate Bay has been using for the last couple of years. By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality, unencrypted 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."
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.
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 Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation is promoting the free and opensource Miro software as their preferred BitTorrent client. It is user friendly and contains everything you need to both download and play the high quality video files.
Now that's public service broadcasting!
Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation sets up its own bittorrent tracker
(Thanks, Eirikso!)
