Norway's public broadcaster launches BitTorrent tracker
Norway's public broadcaster NRK receives 94 percent of its revenue from a license fee paid by TV-owning households in the country, and it's charged not with making money, but with getting its content in front of as many people as possible. To do that, NRK has just launched its own BitTorrent tracker to distribute its TV shows-DRM-free, of course. NRK takes its distribution mission so seriously that it's even providing subtitle files so that non-Norwegians can translate the shows easily.
Given what the Norwegians have been up to recently, this isn't surprising. NRK started distributing shows via BitTorrent in early 2008 and said that the experiment was a great success. (Canada's CBC did a similar but smaller-scale BitTorrent trial.)
Being a small broadcaster in a small country is a bit like being a new indie band rehearsing in a garage; just getting your work in front of people is a major challenge, since you're competing with everything being pumped out by the big industry players. Between January and March 2008, the first NRK show available (legally) via BitTorrent had been downloaded 90,000 times, exceeding expectations.
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