cce blog

Public TV in the P2P world

While living in Hong Kong earlier this year, I felt something "missing" from my life -- English-language TV. Equipped with broadband internet access, I began watching huge amounts of video on my computer -- whole documentaries from PBS's Frontline and reasonably-long clips from The Daily Show, as well as obscure movies/documentaries I'd find on file-sharing networks. That's when I began thinking that non-commercial content providers like PBS, BBC, NPR, etc could reach a much wider audience by distributing more of their programs for free on the web.

Archives of most public radio programs are currently available online, but public TV archives, because of the bandwidth costs, are much less available. Some, like PBS Frontline and BBC News, had shows online, but bigger archives on the scale of archive.org's movies or the Library of Congress "American Memory" motion picture archives were more what I desired. Often a BBC video piece would drop off the site completely after a week. Annoyed at the way many sites split up, say, an hour-long piece into 6 separate video clips, I found ways to download RealPlayer and Windows Media streams, stitch them back together, and then began distributing the new full-length versions on P2P programs like Kazaa.

With new P2P distribution technologies like BitTorrent, FreeCache and Overnet, and the advent of cheap Linux server farms, concerns about the expense of streaming media services diminish greatly. By letting the users distribute the content themselves, all with the approval of the content providers -- like how Etree works -- public broadcasters could find whole new audiences, and new potential donors. After all, it's not unusual for a public radio station to receive pledges from "Internet-only" listeners these days. And something like ShareReactor, Peerweb or Transmission Films could help to catalog and rate all this new public content.

It now looks like we're taking first steps in this direction: according to this Slate article by Paul Boutin, the BBC is planning to put its entire archive on the web. This would certainly be very exciting for infotainment junkies like me searching for engaging and thought-provoking online content beyond Homestar Runner. (For example, I recently watched the Frontline episode The Merchants of Cool, a 50-minute look at the industry of marketing & focus groups surrounding teens, the practice of "coolhunting", and the rapid co-opting of "cool" new trends by advertisers/media groups, one of the best shows I've watched online, I highly recommend you watch it.)

Finally, on broadcast: what if NYC's PBS station Thirteen began broadcasting its live video stream online, much like radio station WNYC does? Most public radio stations already do online broadcasting; with cheap P2P broadcasting technologies like CMU's ESM, will live, broadcast public TV be next?