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Nine Promotes Canal Road By Allowing Free Downloading of Episodes
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!
Links for April 6th 2008
Interesting links for April 6th 2008:
- Study: Violent Games Relax Players [Next Generation – Interactive Entertainment Today, Video Game and Industry News – Home of Edge Online] – “People who play violent videogames online generally feel more relaxed and less angry after they have played, according to a new study by psychologists at Middlesex University” (Lets see if this one gets mainstream news coverage!)
- Battlestar Galactica: Join the Fight | Battlestar Galactica Social Network [SCIFI.COM] – The SciFi network have launched the “Battlestar Galactica social gaming experience” … you can be either human or Cylon (oddly enough). The “game” seems a little clunky in the layout and interface, but I’ll have to give it a try…
- The art of the teleprompter [Presentation Zen] – Some interesting thinking about the art of using teleprompters (esp looking at US politicians). John McCain doesn’t fare very well!
- How does the new, free online Photoshop match up with its free competition? [OJR] – “In summary, I didn’t find any functionality in Photoshop Express that Web users didn’t already have available to them in Picasa, Picnik and Splashup.”
Links for April 1st 2008
Interesting links for March 31st 2008 through April 1st 2008:
- Police take a tip from YouTube [Australian IT] – “Call it BlueTube. Citizen-supplied video evidence of crimes appears set to take off with police forces around Australia.”
- Embracing the torrent of online video [BBC NEWS | Technology] – Very positive piece from Michael Geist on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s decision to make one of their shows available for free, without DRM, via peer to peer Bittorrent networks.
- Decline Of US Newspapers Accelerating [Tech Crunch] – “Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006…”
Do Free Online Books Make Money?
Does making a book freely available online hurt or enhance the sales of the hardcopy? Advocates suggest that if you read a bit of the book online you’re more likely to buy the hardcopy if you like it and finish reading it on paper. You’re also more likely to recommend it to friends who might buy it, too. Those against think that free only equals more free, and no one is going to buy a book if you get given the whole thing at no cost. Neil Gaiman and his publisher have been experimenting with this question, and Gaiman’s American Gods has been available for free online for a month (it disappears again in a few days). So, it’s definitely interesting to see who many people read the book, and how hardcopy sales appear to have been effected. So: the initial stats from Neil Gaiman’s blog:
It’s worth drawing people’s attention to the fact that the free online reading copy of American Gods is now in its last six days online (it ends 31 March 08). I learned this from an email from Harper Collins, which also told me the latest batch of statistics.
For American Gods:
68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods
3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate
And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%, rather than tumbling into the abyss. (Which is — the rise, not the tumble — what I thought would happen. Or at least, what I devoutly hoped would happen.)
The book is up at This URL, if you’re interested, or want to pass it along to a friend.
While this example isn’t exactly necessarily a template for new authors – Gaiman’s existing reputation as an author and his well-read blog both come into play in looking at the figures (not to mention that American Gods is an excellent read) – the overall figures are definitely encouraging and hopefully we’ll see more experiments like this one in the future (and, yes, I realise this isn’t the first such experiment – hello Cory Doctorow – but it’s still a noteworthy one).
Hillary Clinton and the perils of stock footage
We’ve been talking about all sorts of things to do with media production these past few weeks in my Digital Media unit, including some conversations about stock footage. So, it’s rather timely to see that, as has been widely blogged elsewhere, one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign advertisements has turned back on her due to the use of purchased stock footage. This is the advertisement in question, about the Red Phone ringing at 3am:
However, it turns out that the little girl supposedly afraid in her bed has grown up since that footage was shot, and Casey Knowles is no fan of Hillary Clinton as she explains in this rebuttal on YouTube:
Casey Knowles’ point that she “reject the politics of fear” is powerful given the message the stock footage of her younger self was being used to convey. It’s one of the perils of using stock footage that the people in that footage may very well have a life and opinion of their own. There’s nothing more effective that that last line: “I’m Casey Knowles and I approve this message. And not the other one. Something worth remembering both in politics and when sourcing stock footage from archives. [Via Barry]
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