Is BBC trumping Hollywood with free video?

With plans afoot to distribute video content free of charge to Britons over the internet, is the BBC taking a smarter course than Hollywood? Patrick Gray explores the broadcaster's strategy and gets 'father of the internet' Vint Cerf's perspective.

As the US-based MPAA moves to crack down on internet users transferring television programmes using peer-to-peer software, the world's largest public broadcaster, the BBC, has announced plans to help its viewers do exactly that.

Earlier this week the British media outlet announced it would launch an extensive three month internet content trial to begin in September. The interactive Media Player (iMP) pilot will use peer-to-peer technology to deliver 190 hours of TV content and 310 hours of radio recordings to 5,000 households, completely legally and free of charge. The only restriction on the content is digital rights management (DRM) protection to prevent it being played beyond seven days from its original broadcast date.

The move comes less than a week after the MPAA announced its first legal assault on websites offering torrent files that allegedly allow internet users to download television programmes using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol illegally.

However, unlike commercial broadcasters, the BBC isn't concerned with losing advertising revenue by allowing the 'time-shifted' viewing of television programmes. Ashley Highfield, BBC director of new media and technology, said in a statement: "iMP could just be the iTunes for the broadcast industry, enabling our audience to access our TV and radio programmes on their terms - anytime, any place, any how."

BBC.co.uk executive producer Jason Da Ponte said the sheer volume of content offered means the project is only feasible if peer-to-peer technology is used as a distribution mechanism. "Because the BBC is publicly funded, we have to be completely responsible for the costs we incur, and distribution is very expensive," he told silicon.com. The company will not use BitTorrent or other free variants of peer-to-peer products, opting for a proprietary solution instead.

Commercial broadcasters, however, are facing a threat from the increasingly popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer software. According to a survey conducted by Envisional, a UK-based internet monitoring company that sells anti-piracy monitoring services, 70 per cent of all illegally downloaded television programmes are transferred using BitTorrent.

The popularity of illegally sharing television programmes over the internet has exploded. The Envisional survey released in April claims the UK and Australia are the biggest offenders, responsible for an estimated 18 and 15 per cent of total TV piracy respectively, with the number of illegal downloads up 150 per cent in the last year worldwide.

With US-made television programmes often delayed by many months and some new shows cancelled mid-season due to poor ratings, internet users are taking matters into their own hands. They're downloading commercial-free pirated variants of their favourite shows, and the problem is getting worse.

For example, during 2003 and 2004 every episode of the third series of 24 was downloaded 35,000 times. In 2005, that number has grown to 95,000 for the fourth series of the program.

According to Vint Cerf, who is often credited as the 'father of the internet' for his role in engineering the Internet Protocol, says the trend is ominous. "People are trickle-charging their hard drives with video," he told silicon.com. "The bulk of the video material that you see on television... 80 to 85 per cent is pre-recorded material. You can move pre-recorded material as a file without having to worry."

Because time-shifting a pre-recorded programme is inconsequential, Cerf, who currently serves as the chairman of Icann and the vice president of technology strategy at MCI, is convinced the media landscape will change. "I'm pretty well persuaded that real-time video is going to be reserved for sports events and real-time news and things like that," he says.

But it's not all bad news for Hollywood. "I'm encouraging people in the movie industry to look at these technologies," Cerf says. "The industry that relies on intellectual property as its primary source of revenue, if they're smart, they're going to look to use this technology in ways that's profitable for them."

Many technologies introduced in the last 20 years have had the potential for abuse, Cerf says, but DRM and digital watermarking technology may allow the movie industry to use peer-to-peer technology to distribute content profitably.

Initially trialled in the summer of 2004, iMP won't be launched until 2006 at the earliest, according to BBC's Da Ponte, and will only be available to UK residents due to copyright licensing restrictions, initially at least.

British readers interested in signing up for the trial should email imptrial@bbc.co.uk including their name, contact details, age and postcode.