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.

NRK wants to test new distribution models, but simply putting one's material out on P2P networks doesn't provide good data. Running an official NRK tracker will provide better statistics about how the BitTorrent downloads are used. First up on the new site: a "very popular television series about people living in remote places in Norway." If you're pining for the fjords, .torrent links can be found on NRK's announcement page.

Getting "open"



Norway has been all about "openness" in all its forms recently. Two weeks ago, the country's education minister said there was "no future in fighting" P2P file-sharing, comparing the technology (even when used to infringe copyright) to the radio or the VCR, which created huge new opportunities for artists.

Norway has also gone after Apple over its iTunes DRM, threatening to bring a legal case against the company if it didn't make its products usable on other devices (the complaint was dropped when Apple announced that the full iTunes store would drop DRM—on music, anyway).

ISPs in the country even adopted a voluntary set of network neutrality principles in February after the plan was pushed by the Norwegian Post and Telecommunications Authority.

But free and open content isn't quite as simple as it sounds. In an interview last year, NRK's Eirik Solheim said clearing rights for free worldwide Internet distribution was a huge problem, especially for archival material. Music rights need to be cleared; so do contracts involving the actors and any third-party sponsors. The shows that NRK has so far released on BitTorrent were developed with these issues in mind; the first one, for instance, required a special contract with the show's host and the composition and recording of all music used in the production.

The licensing issue became especially public back in January when NRK put up podcasts containing the complete library of Beatles songs, then had to pull the whole production after it became clear that NRK did not have the proper rights to distribute the music.

Bold experiments



Though the new effort remains experimental, it's a bolder sort of experiment than most broadcasters are making, even publicly-funded ones. That may be because so much less money is at stake. Compared to another license-funded broadcaster like the BBC, NRK's content doesn't generate tremendous DVD sales numbers on both sides of the Atlantic, nor is much of it repackaged for channels like BBC America. Though the BBC has mooted various ambitious plans to put archival content online, its current iPlayer system only allows viewers to stream programming from the previous week, and only to UK residents.

NRK's scale therefore gives it more room for experimentation with worldwide distribution, fansubs, BitTorrent trackers, and the use of DRM-free content. Judging from NRK's own comments thus far, it doesn't appear that the broadcaster has yet run into significant domestic opposition from those who pay the license fee, though this is an obvious potential problem. How many pensioners with an old TV set will be thrilled about paying the license when young people in Norway—and around the world—simply go online and download the shows for free?

As TV migrates onto the Internet and can be delivered to any screen, NRK's experiment in distribution may gradually morph into an experiment into changing license fee models in the digital age.