BBC goes torrent

depends on pricing.
but sounds interesting.

Given that this is not web-exclusive content, but back catalogue stuff, I doubt it will be worth anyone's time to crack the DRM - if they want to put an illegal copy online, they will just rip the DVD. Plus the majority of the content is probably already available from less legitimate sources for free download, if one were so inclined.

Yay to the BBC for trying BUT... I might be interested If the price was quite considerably less than buying the DVDs but even then DRM could kill the whole thing in an instant.

This is absolutely disgusting, what a cheek the BBC have, not only do they demand a license fee for their propaganda driven drivel, and £400 million from the treasury tax coffers,they also want to sell it to people world wide, making even more money at our expense, the BBC suck, don't believe the rather well produced marketing hype. They also make a fortune from BBC America, showing programs we have paid for on their commercial channel.

:| Um... I was going to say,

I have moved out of the U.K. over 8 months ago and no longer pay the licence fee (although I didn't have to pay it in Ireland and we still got it?). there are a number of shows that I miss.

TopGear
The Snooker Coverage
Ideal (bbc3 - Jonny Vegas)
The news / Panarama
I would have no problem paying some sort of internet licence fee to access some of these shows, especially the comedies.

Suppose I shouldn't really ask, but does anyone know how I can fake to look like I am in England (instead of Austria) so that I can get my TV stories :D

I have tried using a anonymous proxy, but failed cos I didn't know what I was doing.

Flat-rate charge for reliable access to back catalogue(s - in the form of 'channels' or eras perhaps?).
Clarify Qos/Availability - this is important re: who's bandwidth and machine resources are being used to support the service. If it's the user-community ponying up their bandwidth and timeslices, you shouldn't expect them to pay per-item when it's economically impractical for them to individually purchase a [Digitally Restricted Medium] copy of each episode of each show they have an interest in.
News/Public Domain material - will this/would this ever be freely available?

How will this relate to the TV license fees for UK residents and for those outside the UK? Where are the lines drawn between public service, generating revenue and the global benefit of the Flying Circus?

Are there any current services available to British higher-level education institutions via JANET which offer access to the BBC digital archives for research?

Irregardless, good show Beeb.

If the revenue was used to reduce the licence fee then I would think this is a great idea. However I am sure it will not and that will be the biggest disappointment.
Not sure how much I would use it, a quick flick through Sky at any one moment can find you pretty much all of the BBC back catalogue playing anyway.

In all fairness, because the BBC is supposed to be a public service, not a money grabbing corporation, they should make this service free to use for everyone who pays the license fee, but charge people in other contries something like 50p an episode without DRM.

I agree with TheSaladMan... those in the UK who pay the license fees (via a Television License) should be able to get these for free. Others who don't? Charge them. But hey, why am I not surprised? These will probably come DRM'd to the eyeballs, too. :(

Theres so many positives and negatives i dont know where to start lets start with the pro's

If its DRM free this would be the first major TV channel/network in the western world (i beleive but dont qoute me) maybe the world to sell DRM free tv shows it actually owns which is a HUGE+ (well i think the itunes vids aint drm'd for tech reasons but their crap quality so who cares)

Finnally a way for expats to watch UK TV legally (this includes me YAY) tho not alowing audio streaming of the world cup was a big let down :( cause US commentators SUCK

Yet another company seeing that torrent isnt evil in nature YAY :D

and now for the negative (or the could be negative if they do it poorley)

If its DRM'd there is no point at all to this in the slightest since you can already obtain shows from public trackers and an even WIDER selection from private ones (not that i would know of any such places *cough*) old and new even upped after being capped withing mins

Slow download speed due to poor seeder support. I know of people *cough* who can max out at 600kB a sec from certain private trackers. If i pay for it i really have no incentive at all to seed which can easily lead to lack of bandwidth from the source.

Which leads me to pricing. Heres where i give an idea scrap the whole pay per download idea its flawed and dosent really work unless its somone whos paranoid about getting sued so goes legal no matter how bad a deal it is. i say go the monthly fee route (for outside UK inside should be free tbh no matter what). heres the intresting part to solve the above issue. Take a tip from private trackers reward those who seed by either making it really cheap for them say $15 a month fee would be reduced to $5 for those that keep a ratio of 1.0 or 1.5. Should be reasonably easy to implement (especially since they are getting a customized client) and would more or less end the bandwidth headache.

File formats. Now if they go the WMV route or the low res route again this sucks DIVX is king we all know it hell mpeg would be better than wmv


thats it expect one more thing

BBC America is run by discovery channel (god knows who owns them tho) So yes the BBC does make money from it but so does ITV (they have footballers wives on god only knows why its CRAP) and i beleive ive seen 1 or 2 sky shows too kenny vs spenny? and defo HEX. I cant blame them for that id rather they increased the show quality by selling it overseas than doubling or trippling the license fee. Just imagine how much cash sky 1 gets from having adverts AND monthly fees.

[rant/]

this article seems to have left out the fact that this is only for NON UK residents, if you live in the UK you wont have anything to do with this idea

what us license payers are getting is the BBC iPlayer, formally known as IMP

check out wikipedia or the bbc iplayer website for more information

this will be free and will let us watch any programs that have been on TV in the last 7 days but will have DRM so after the 7 days have past they'll be deleted

Yeah, I was thinking about this.

What do you think would happen if they released these without DRM for a small fee?
Say, £1 per episode?

I think the service would take off tbh.

I'd be happy to pay a very small fee to cover bandwidth costs (which they offset anyway since they're using torrents) and other overheads.

As they say, there's no such thing as a free lunch but a very cheap lunch is always nice... :D

Originally Posted by phat-ant
depends on pricing.
but sounds interesting.

QFT

Originally Posted by Paradigm Shifter
I agree with TheSaladMan... those in the UK who pay the license fees (via a Television License) should be able to get these for free. Others who don't? Charge them.

The BBC already sells DVDs with the same content on. People who pay the license fee don't get any sort of reduction on the DVDs so why should they get these for free?

I understand people get annoyed at paying for something twice, but the BBC is a non-profit making organisation so the money just goes back into making quality entertainment - if they stopped selling DVDs and BBC America the BBC would probably have to either shut up shop or put a huge amount extra on the license fee.

fini

I'd be interested if it was cheap and non-DRM infested.
I alerady have too much doctor who but I'd be well up for the Red Dwarf.

Bandwith? What bandwidth. I'd rather them pay me for all the memory use their custom client will waste

I just had a look at their client, guess what? - no linux support :( Kills it for me, although I can't really see this taking off.

You have to hand it to the BBC for getting maximum mileage out of repeats. I have recently paid my licence fee. If this is a success, then it may point the BBC towards "pay-per-view" for the UK, so, we would only pay the BBC for what we actually watch. That would be good for the consumer so you only pay for what you use, if the revenue drops due to say, too many repeats, for example they might improve the quality of service and they seem to have the money to do it. Why not send out a "Customer satisfaction survey" with the licence reminder, that way the people making a financial contribution to the BBC can have their say, then publish the results. Just trying to make some constructive suggestions here.

Hmmm...BBC (1&2) are freely available in Dutch cable television.

I used to watch red dwarf, and frankly have been looking for it on the web. (as it's not available outside the UK)
Well, the content is there...BUT:

-It's illegal (okay, most user's don't care)
-It's bad quality. (appears not the DVD's got ripped, but the earlier VHS-copies)
-It's incomplete.

So yes, for a (moderate) fee, I'd happily purchase them complete and in high quality, as well as different content really.

Originally Posted by Fusen
this article seems to have left out the fact that this is only for NON UK residents, if you live in the UK you wont have anything to do with this idea

what us license payers are getting is the BBC iPlayer, formally known as IMP

check out wikipedia or the bbc iplayer website for more information

this will be free and will let us watch any programs that have been on TV in the last 7 days but will have DRM so after the 7 days have past they'll be deleted

However, the article seems to refer to older, back catalog, programs. One would assume that we will not be excluded from that. To be fair, I'd pay a certain amount to get my hands on even DRM'd old Dr Who, at least partly because just finding the DVD's is damn hard, and I'd also hope this was a fair bit cheaper than them.

There must be plenty of movies and mini-series languishing in the archives. Shows we can't get in the U.S., even on dvd.