Whether the video industry can pull all the strands together and start offering a usable, affordable and truly global service remains to be seen.Ĭoming soon The list of movies will expand to more than 1,000 titles. "To change attitudes, we simply have to try to give people what they want, when they want it."
"This is easily the biggest hurdle we face," says Paul Hague. The more conscientious file sharers shun commercially available material in favour of recently broadcast TV shows that people may have missed first time around although still of dubious legality, it's a true video-on-demand service, and it is becoming so widely used that the industry faces an uphill struggle to persuade consumers that they shouldn't be downloading something for nothing. BitTorrent was designed to facilitate the transfer of large amounts of data between computers, making it perfect for the sharing of video files with no copy protection currently, the launch of a new DVD is invariably accompanied by a glut of users downloading an illegally "ripped" version using BitTorrent. In practice, some DRM restrictions can be subverted by tools that savvy code-warriors upload to the internet, but so many obstacles are being placed between consumer and content that the rise in the use of BitTorrent software is far from surprising. This avoids giving viewers a video file that could be duplicated, shared or copied to another medium. Concern about piracy has meant that recent previews of the TV comedy shows Titty Bang Bang and The IT Crowd - from the BBC and Channel 4 respectively - were streamed directly to the web browser. This caution doesn't just surround the kind of video material that will be available to us online, but also how we view it. Video rights owners don't want to make the same mistake. This led to an online music market largely controlled by one company that can dictate pricing and terms. Media companies ended up being forced to the negotiating table as Apple's iTunes became established. This reticence is partly explained by the boom in paid-for music downloads. You can't force them to make a decision - they'll take as long as they want to take." "Along with everyone else, we've been trying to reach agreements with the content owners, but it took 14 months for us to obtain music-video rights from just one of them.
Paul Hague, founder of the British Internet Broadcasting Company, explains the predicament. It's inconceivable that they won't offer premium content in the UK at some point, but in the meantime it's left to a handful of services (see box right) to share a fairly small amount of material between them. Pakistan cricketer Shahid Afridi's record-breaking century in Nairobi in 1996 is just one of thousands of gems that have emerged. This makes for a predictable glut of You've Been Framed-style sequences of family members breaking wind, but there are also many wonderful TV moments, seen by few at the time of broadcast, which have been digitised from old VHS collections. Search engines such as Blinkx and Yahoo! index videos from a host of sites such as BBC News and ITN, while the latest workplace distractions have come from Google Video and YouTube, which offer users the chance to share their clips with the world. More powerful computers, more efficient data compression techniques and much faster download speeds are making internet-sourced video material not only accessible, but almost enjoyable. A tiny window on a computer monitor displaying a fuzzy and barely audible video clip no longer elicits the gasps of amazement it once did.
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