I know many of you are still waiting for some conclusions after my recent visit to DLD in Munich. But I’ve been busy making stuff available on BitTorrent:
As one of many ways to reach people with our content we have decided to do an experiment and make one of our most popular television series available through BitTorrent.This technology makes it possible for us to make our content available in a very high quality without having to invest in large server farms and expensive bandwidth.
The very popular series called “Nordkalotten 365″ has been aired on traditional TV in Norway. Over 900 000 of Norway’s 4,6 million watched the show in average, and the marketshare was close to 50%! “Nordkalotten 365″ is now made available for download. In this series the experienced hiker Lars Monsen has traveled alone through the north of Scandinavia for one year. The first episode is already published and the next episodes will be made available as they are encoded.
Read the rest of the story on NRKbeta.
We are suggesting that people use Miro to download the content because it contains both the torrent client and the playback codec. But you can use whatever bittorrent client you want.
Now help us by digging this story!
The story has been running on all major news sites in Norway, and recently we made the front page of BoingBoing.
And yes, a report from DLD is on its way.
eirikso 
Now the only thing missing is suntitles in English so that those of us living outside Norway can enjoy it with our families 🙂 A separate subtitling file is possible to use with a lot of players, so if the subtitling is already done, can you please make a request to the right people?
I don’t believe these numbers at all, NRK has always had inflated ratings. Giving it away on BT is still cool tho, but might not be a smart move in the long run. If they do it too much, people will dump RksTV/Cable/Sat and poof, the NRK tax must die and so will NRK (Or switch to ads and/or a pay per download model (One can hope I guess))
My opinion is that people will dump RksTV/Cable/Sat anyway. Not tomorrow, but we need to start experimenting with this kind of distribution now. Not doing so would be just as stupid as trying to stop people from accessing music on the internet and hope that they will keep on running down stores buying plastic. Somebody tried that. Doesn’t seem to work.
Just like the music industry the television industry needs to rethink distribution, business models and financing.
The NRK needs to reach as many people as possible. I think giving it away on BT is a very smart move. Especially in the long run.
Just thought that Joost is a very futuristic distrobuter. It’s free, contains ads, which are not that anoying (short sequences etc.) and are slowly getting more media content! Think the speed is a bit slow (using a wireless network – could be that?).
Otherwise I think NRK could profit on such distrobution, because – at the moment – we all have a TV and in Norway that equal to having NRK, and in the long run more fans of the shows would want to watch tv, because they have the option to watch it if they miss the original tv-show. They can catch up and even want to watch tv live-program the next time!
Actually, we are in talks with Joost. 🙂
May I ask for your personal opinion on Joost. Quality or what ever you have on your personal mind?
I think Joost is a very interesting approach. A much more TV-centric system than most of the web based video offerings out there. It works very well, and the GUI has become very responsive and user firendly.
The image quality could have been better, but it’s just a question of time before they can increase the bandwidth and get better quality.
Yes!finally a futureminded state-owned tv broadcaster !
keep up the NICE work!!
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[…] while after we did our successful experiment with BitTorrent distribution I was interviewed by the German news web site […]