As I try to slide into my Christmas vacation, I was thinking about how TV networks should be distributing their TV shows online. It’s a given that play-on-demand, web-browser-based video players are the standard right now, but the number of people still downloading content using Bittorrent really show that the needs of the viewers aren’t be serviced. Which raises the question: why can’t TV networks distribute their shows, DRM-free, on Bittorrent?

From what I understand, it comes down to two central problems:

Rights

TV companies sell the rights to air and to distribute online on a country-by-country basis. For example, they can’t allow an affiliate in England to stream complete seasons of “The O.C.” to Americans

Monetization

Bandwidth costs money. Viewing shows online takes eyeballs away from TV which costs them advertising revenue. They need to make money when people watch their shows online, or it just costs them money.

As a result of each of these problems, the majority of TV networks seem to take the approach that Bittorrent can be brought-down by enhancing strategies/technologies that do take into account rights/monetization concerns. For example, web-browser based streaming of their shows can be geo-fenced (locked down by IP-blocks by country) and surrounded by advertising. DRM-ed downloads can be locked down by country and littered with video advertisements. But with Bittorrent still dominating web traffic, it seems foolhardy to write-off the technology.

Which brings me to the (obvious) conclusion that the TV networks should work with Bittorrent instead of fighting it, by coming up strategies that do allow them to manage rights and make money. There has to be a way, and with the same amount of resources they spend fighting the trend, I’m sure they could flush out some ideas.

The central problem with Bittorrent downloads is their slowness. But direct downloads from the TV network websites cost too much bandwidth. So I suggest a mash-up: the TV networks could seed Bittorrent traffic to videos to which they own a license, but only to people in their country who are using Bittorrent on a page with advertisements. For example, say CTV owns the online rights to “South Park” in Canada. They create something like BitLet that allows visitors to download any episode of “South Park” already floating around in cyber-space but only if they are Canadian and doing so via that webpage. CTV could rely on the anonymous “pirate” encoders to do the encoding, while they reap the benefits. The visitors get faster download speeds and CTV gets to serve ads while the download is going (and metrics on the number of Canadian downloads of that show). Win-win! They could even take it a step further by stitching in ads to the finished download. As long as it was tastefully done, they could append an ad to the beginning of the video to further monetize the whole process.

At the end of the day, TV networks should start focussing on the reality of how people download TV on the internet. Just because they don’t like it, doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. They just need to figure out how to satisfy their own demands in emerging marketplaces. And to do that, they need to start thinking about them