Canadian TV to Adopt DRM-Free BitTorrents

An anonymous reader writes "Canada's public broadcast network, CBC, is to adopt DRM free BitTorrent distribution of one of its major primetime shows, Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. The effort has already been hailed by Canadian copyright guru Michael Geist, who expects the decision to add fuel to Canada's net neutrality debate. A CBC producer behind the show told CNET that the motivation for the move was that CBC 'wanted the show to be as accessible as possible to as many Canadians as possible, in the format that they want it in.' As for DRM, she said 'I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it.' She added that 'if it's bad for the consumers, its bad for the company.'"

throttling from bell and rogers

Hopefully this means that Bell and Rogers will both have to stop throttling Bittorrent downloads. Some days on rogers I would get faster downloads on dialup.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

An excellent point that I didn't even think of until you mentioned it. I totally agree; I'm on Bell where I am and it's awful; ALL of my P2P traffic is capped to 30KiB/s and it's quite painful when I should be able to access that content in a matter of minutes as opposed to a matter of hours.

Aikon-

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

Fortunately, as opposed to the US, you do not have to solely depend on large ISPs as Bell, Videotron or Rogers. Remember this [slashdot.org] story? There are dozens of independent ISPs, and while they often use Bell's networks, I have not seen any throttling on P2P as of yet. I routinely get speeds of close to 500KB/s.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

If by "locked", you mean you need to pay an ETF to get out, you're not really stuck. They're required by law to offer wholesale service, assuming you're hooked up to an ADSL or ADSL2+ DSLAM.

You might still want to consider a $10/mth secondary login with TekSavvy (not advertised, but still available). 100GB of bandwidth per month. Not a huge amount, but it's still a lot better than what you're getting with Bell (and you can add another 100GB for another $10 per month).

Of course, you'd still have to pay your full Sympatico bill, as the TekSavvy login is just a PPPoE account. If your Sympatico subscription is PPPoE-based, you can get a secondary login and avoid the throttling and ultra-low caps.

I suggest you call in (1-877-779-1575) between 8AM and 2AM EST and discuss your options with TekSavvy. I'm sure they can work something out with you.

If you'd be so kind, because your situation is quite interesting, it'd be appreciated if you could post about your story in the official TekSavvy forums (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/teksavvy), as I'm sure many of us would be very interested in hearing the details of your issues with Bell.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

You have a Sympatico account. You sign up for Techsavvy as a secondary. Doesn't the 'last mile' still come through Sympatico? And won't you still be subject to their throttling?

Not exactly. DSL services are handled by a division of Bell called Nexxia. ISPs, Sympatico included are all attached to the Nexxia infrastructure. If a consumer subscribes with an independent ISP, that ISP issues a service order to Bell to provision the copper 'last mile'. A Bell tech goes to the CO (Central Office) and hooks up some Nexxia gear to the subscriber's copper. Nexxia bills the ISP, the ISP bills the subscriber, and everyone's happy. Yes, Sympatico is a Bell Canada division as well, but they're effectively a subscriber to the Nexxia division just the same as any other DSL ISP.

An amusing aside to all of this is that the end-user technically can't call up Bell and request removal of services, for instance in the case that they wish to change providers. They aren't the purchaser of the DSL service. Twisted, but true. The subscriber needs the current ISP to issue a service-removal order to Bell/Nexxia.

I personally had an entertaining time moving off Sympatico to a local provider a few years ago. I called Sympatico and was told that there were exactly two days a month when I was ALLOWED to terminate my service, and I'd just missed my two days by a couple days. I'd be stuck another month. I told them I was content to lose the service for the remainder of the month and continue paying, but they wouldn't allow it. I spoke to Bell's DSL provisioning department, and they told me they couldn't accept service instructions from me. I talked to the owner of my (then) new ISP, and he placed a provisioning order anyway. A Bell tech went out, and disconnected my copper from Nexxia's DSLAM to one of his (this ISP has their own DSLAMs in some COs, still backend connected to Nexxia). The tech thought something was amiss but did the work. I was happy. My sync rates went up, everything was grand, and I started to wait until I could cancel Sympatico. Two days later, I lost sync. We made some calls. The tech had investigated and found out that I didn't have a cancel-service order from Sympatico, so went back and moved my copper back into Nexxia's DSLAM. My ISP made a phone call, spoke to the tech personally, who then re-corrected "illegally", and that tech knew to wait for and disregard the eventual Symaptico de-provisioning order when it came. Eventually I cancelled with Sympatico and everything's been heaven since.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

Try activating encryption in your bit torrent client. I'm certain you'll see a dramatic difference.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

They don't need to inspect the packets to identify them as p2p. Encryption doesn't do a damn thing for me (Rogers) unless I tunnel it all through a VPN.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

I'm on Rogers, and it works for me. If there are sufficient seeders and peers, I regularly get up to 600 KB / sec on regular high-speed, up from 20 KB / sec without.

Make sure you're using a non-standard port. Also, don't force encryption, just enable it. That will net you encrypted traffic + whatever low level of throttled traffic your ISP allows.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

Let me clarify a little. I have encryption enabled and I do get high speed downloads, it's my upstream that is throttled to hell and back. Upstream usually floats around 1 - 4 k/s. Once in a while I will temporarily get a fast upstream connection to some other client and I assume what is happening here is I am connected to another Rogers user so it is exempt from the throttling rules. If I force all my traffic through a ssh tunnel then suddenly my upstream shoots up near where it should be (80+ k/s).

My guess is that under normal circumstances Rogers is able to identify the traffic patterns of p2p (tons of connections to many different clients) without needing to look inside the individual packets. They then go ahead and close off most of the connections which results in the throttling. If I force it all through my ssh tunnel, it's all going to 1 host so it no longer looks like p2p traffic, just some unidentifiable high speed encrypted stream and therefore it's not subject to throttling.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

I wish P2P designers would take a cue from the internet worm designers and prioritize "nearby" IP addresses first when choosing from a list (IE, if someone is in the same /16 as you, choose them over someone in a totally foreign network). My guess is that it would improve your throughput enough to make it worth the effort, and it would be really simple to add the logic.

No Offense

But I'm not sure I would have watched this on T.V. (if I had one), let alone downloaded it (legally or otherwise) =/

Aikon-

Re:No Offense

But come on, this is so cool, suddenoutbreakofcommonsense, etc etc. Is it just me or is canada suddenly awesome? Eh?

Re:No Offense

What it means is that the **AA, seeing the writing on the wall, is going to BLAME CANADA!

This time it will be Bush who accidently says into a live microphopne "We start bombing in 15 minutes."

He'll tell the voters "We're liberating all our oil from their commie socialist rule."

Plus, now that Canadian Tire money is worth more than the US Dollar ... what has he got to lose?

Re:No Offense

We've been awesome for nearly a century and a half. People just didn't start noticing until now.

Re:No Offense

one point on this. there is a Canadian TV show I really like. I cannot get it here in the States. Even their web page has a "This show cannot be viewed in your country" error when you attempt to load clips. Does this mean that soon the actually good programming in Canada will be legally viewable here? I sometimes see TV from S Africa, Argentina, Singapore and India. it pains me to think I may need to use not legal means to be informed about these countries and about Canada....

Finally, someone gets it.

The best way to make money in the long term is to have happy customers. Period. Now if only some US companies would learn that...

Re:Finally, someone gets it.

CBC is Canada's public broadcaster, but it isn't the same as PBS. For one thing, they do run commercials in programming the same way the other commercial broadcasters do.

Re:Finally, someone gets it.

CBC is older than PBS by some 35 years. If anything PBS is America's answer to CBC, not the other way around.

Oh Canada....

From healthcare to Hockey, why do the Canadiens constantly get things right where we can not. As an example, anyone who has ever gone to Niagra falls can tell you that the Canadiens are better than us at almost everything. The New York side of the falls is horriblly dirty and devoid of any decent food or lodgings, while the Canadian side is clean, has a vast number of resteraunts(including a Hard Rock cafe), and even has gambling. All this and you could eat off the streets! Why is this, does anyone even know?

Not a good example

Niagara falls is not a good example becase nature itself is on Canada's side. The reason the Canadian side of the falls has grown into such a tourist attraction is the horseshoe falls, which are the most dramatic portion, is best visible from the Canadian side. You can hardly see anything from the New York side.

So, over time, more and more money went to the Canadian side developing the tourist area. Think about it, if you are a developer spending $100 million on a hotel, you want it to have the best possible view - so you put it on the Canadian side.

Re:Oh Canada....

why do the Canadiens constantly get things right where we can not. As an example, anyone who has ever gone to Niagra falls can tell you that the Canadiens are better than us at almost everything

my personal favorite...

Americans have the right to bear arms.
Canadian women have the right to bear breasts.

I believe the reason for us getting everything right while the US gets everything wrong, is that section 15 of the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms only extends rights to 'actual persons', not 'legal persons' like the US system (corporations are classified as 'legal persons') so we don't have the same problem of having to constantly welcome our evil corporate overlords.

CBC - It's Publicly funded

Keep in mind folks.

The good 'ole CBC is a publicly funded crown corp. So yeah, if they want to cut out a revenue stream...go for it...but we're paying for it in taxes.

It's a novel experiment, and I love the idea. But I'm not sure that this exact model would work for a Private US broadcaster or private Canadian Broadcaster.

Keep in mind. PBS has had documentary downloads available forever. PBS Frontline.

Re:CBC - It's Publicly funded

What is with you and all the FUD?

Is it cutting out a revenue stream? Or increasing the size of the pie? How do you know they aren't embedding commercials in the bt version and making MORE money by telling advertisers they are reaching MORE eyes? Show me.

Even if we accept that they will make less money with this distribution method, is it going to be significant to overshadow the savings to the CBC by using bt as a distribution channel? About 1/3 of CBC's funding comes from non-taxpayer sources, according to their 2005-2006 annual report. Of that 1/3, only a fraction of it is from advertising. Of that fraction, only a smaller portion yet comes from TV advertising. Is that a significant amount? Show me.

Why are you so ready to draw negative conclusions so early?

Its a canadian thing...

Guys, you may think that this is the rare exceptions, but in reality this is the way the wind is blowing in Canada. We have a privacy act in Canada that many legal scollars agree that DRM violates because it requires to much information about the user of the file. The long and short of it is this. In Canada you can buy a lawnmower take it apart and make something out of it, In the US if you did that you violate the DMCA...do you see the problem here?

*NOT* the first (at CBC or North America) !!

I was a software developer on the CBC programme ZeD, and we torrented [zed.cbc.ca] (and streamed and broadcast) our " New new media" episode almost 3 years ago (April 1st, 2005 to be exact). And while the torrent file still exists, sadly the torrent server is no longer running. I believe we used Xvid as the codec too (or was it divx?), but I am certain there was no DRM on the file. Anyway, ZeD was web 2.0 [zed.cbc.ca] in 2002 !