After the recent debacle with Nine’s Underbelly series becoming a star of the peer-to-peer downloading circuit, the network have taken an entirely different approach with their new offering Canal Road, making the initial episodes available as free downloads.  From NineMSN:

After battling illegal internet downloads of its hit program Underbelly, the Nine Network will offer up free online access to its new series Canal Road. Viewers will have the opportunity to download the first four episodes of the new Aussie drama for free before it debuts on national television on April 16. […] Ninemsn will make the first two episodes available for download on April 7, with episodes three and four following on April 14. Every other episode will be available to download immediately after it airs on the Nine Network.

Nine said in February it was considering taking legal action after thousands of people started downloading leaked episodes of its controversial gangland drama Underbelly, which was banned in Victoria. This time around the network is keen to stress that viewers will be able to get a preview of Canal Road legally. “All downloaded episodes of Canal Road can also be legally shared with family and friends by saving them onto a DVD or through the existing peer-to-peer file sharing programs,” ninemsn said in a statement.

Kudos to Nine: while streaming video of episodes and the occasional downloadable-but-expires-within-a-week episodes have been tried by Australian broadcasters in the past, Nine’s Canal Road episodes can be downloaded, kept, played offline and won’t “expire”.  Indeed, this new ‘Catch-Up TV’ service sports the following message regarding Canal Road:

You can also copy, share and burn each episode to DVD or even distribute the files via file-sharing applications, such as Bit Torrent.

In actually encouraging Australia TV watchers to use Bit Torrent, Nine is finally trying to build on what they know a reasonable segment of their audience are already up to.  However, that notice is a little disingenuous: yes, users can download and redistribute the episodes, BUT in order to play the episodes back, you must have the Hiro Video Player Plugin (which works with Windows Media Player on PCs and Quicktime on Macs) and Hiro inserts advertisements into the downloaded episodes.  So, in order to play the episode, each computer must have Hiro installed.  More to the point, “burn each episode to DVD” sounds like the file can be either converted to a DVD format or can be played in DivX compatible DVD players but this simply isn’t true.

So, while Nine have made leaps and bounds in providing downloadable episodes for their viewers (and certainly Canal Road will be benefiting from the press surrounding such an experiment), they’ve still made claims (such as the episodes being burnable to DVD) which, while not completely untrue, are a little deceptive.  That said, if you are willing to put up with a few ads you can’t fast forward to rewind — Hiro doesn’t seem to insert that many ads (I got three single ads, all around 30 seconds in the 45 minutes playback of the first episode of Canal Road) — then the episodes are of a very decent quality (720×576) although for some reason they did play back on my PC in 4:3 when it was clearly shot in 16:9.

A few solid steps in the right direction here, but still a few more steps worth taking to get legal downloads right!

[Via Across the Mediaverse]