Norwegian broadcaster backs P2P

And how!

Paidcontent have reported that the Norwegian broadcaster, NRK are setting up their own Bittorrent tracker server to enable people to search for their content and share it amongst themselves.

What this means is that they can release much higher quality versions of their programmes and it won’t cost them any extra to distribute them.  It also means that their content starts to become self-organising as the viewers and listeners can link and tag and store the stuff they want.

Already dedicated viewers of some of the material released are producing their own subtitles to translate the programmes into english, known as ‘fansubbing’.

Having your own tracker is also a great idea because it allows you to be free with your content and still retain some control as the tracker server will be accruing some vital statistics about what material is shared, when, by whom  and how widely.

Maybe in the future NRK won’t even need it’s own archives, as the material will all be distributed throughout the computers of the good people of Norway.  (This is clearly fanciful, it will never happen!)

I can’t help thinking that someone in the BBC is thinking that they’ve been beaten to a great idea. But why not make a start by putting every BBC Schools programme broadcast last year on a P2P network, accessed by the BBC’s own torrent tracker?

Teenager loses job over Facebook comment

I was on BBC Look East last night, commenting on the news that a teenage girl was sacked 3 weeks into her job, for telling her Facebook friends that it was boring.

This certainly isn’t an isolated case.

I think that if you’re 16, putting a status update saying that you’re bored is exactly the same as leaning over to your friend in a cafe and saying the same thing. Employers should bear this in mind, but also new employees have to realise that the rest of the world doesn’t work like this yet.

The other important thing is social networking privacy.  Put those settings up to maximum and don’t add people that you don’t know.

Friendship is something to be earned, it’s not something you give away at the click of a button. As you get to know someone more, then you can release some of the privacy controls and let them know a bit more about your life.

Although I have to say, what’s this young lady doing on Facebook? Get over to Plurk!

IBM media study: UK lowest adoption of online video sites

TV viewing drifts to web, mobile video still a minority pass-time

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26077.wss

IBM’s recently released the results of a global survey of media and entertainment habits. What caught my eye was that in spite of this being the home of BBC iPlayer, the UK has the lowest adoption (not sure what their definition for adoption is here) of online video sites of the 6 countries surveyed.

Otherwise, there are no jaw dropping headlines, simply a confirmation of current trends. TV viewing hours continue to give way to view watched online.

There’s the predictable stuff about how people are fine with advertising in the video so they don’t have to pay for it themselves.

The geography highlights continue to be the most interesting overall:

Australia and the U.K. had the highest adoption of social networking sites (although not by much)

The U.S. had the highest adoption of premium video services for the traditional TV, Australia had the lowest.

Japan, Germany and India had the highest adoption of mobile services, including Internet data plans and mobile content plans for video and music.

Christian Science Monitor goes web

It starts at the niche

The 100 year old, and Pulitzer prize winning Christian Science Monitor will no longer be a daily newspaper in 2009.  It’s enhancing web production and will publish a weekly digest instead.

The paper is funded by the church, but loses nearly $20m a year.  It’s definitely a niche publication, I doubt many outside the states who are not in journalism have heard of it.  But I can guarantee more mainstream publishing peers will be closely watching how it handles the transition.

Grade attacks Google, Joost ‘parasites’

IBC 2008

I’m just out of a lively conference keynote session featuring a pre-recorded interview with ITV Executive Chairman Michael Grade and media commentator, Ray Snoddy.

Grade was insistent that the future belonged to companies who could create, own and exploit the right content, seemingly dismissing access technologies as merely ‘railway lines’.

There were audible gasps from some of those listening in the hall when he described companies like Google and Joost as ‘parasites who just live on us’.

“When they invest £1bn a year in UK content, then I’ll be worried.”

beeb.net stops completely

My only email account to never receive a single spam message will disappear

In 1999 with the sudden appearance of ‘free’ dial-up based internet accounts, I joined freebeeb.net – “Free internet access from the BBC”.

Here’s the original BBC News Online story (note the original publishing template – in all probability I worked on this story!)

Although I’m something of an email address tart, I’ve consistently used this address ever since (although I would only dial the access number about 4 times a year just to make sure the account stays valid).

The service is one of the few with full POP/SMTP access, which means I can use email software like Outlook and Thunderbird to access the email in my beeb.net account. I’ve been using it on my N95 phone most recently.

So I was a little bit sad, although unsurprised to get an email into that account last week telling me that it’s all finishing. Here’s the detail direct from Beeb.net.

Beeb.net has been through various stages of closedown since the dot.com bubble burst, probably the most significant happening in 2002.

It’s been a little bit of internet history, which I’m surprised isn’t being reported, perhaps because the number of beeb.net users is now so miniscule that no one has noticed that it’s been working up till now, even though it’s since offered broadband accounts.

At the end of June, spare a thought for a internet pioneer. There were many other free ISPs at the time (in the hundreds!) but none with quite the same name and brand associations.

It wasn’t the BBC Micro, but beeb.net did help tens of thousands of people to get online during a critical period of growth for the internet.

If you also found the full POP/SMTP access helpful, livehacker has a post of how to do the same thing with gmail.