Matti Robinson
30 Jan 2008 7:18
Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK), the Norway's national broadcasting company, has made one of their most popular TV shows available via BitTorrent. The series called Nordkalotten 365 follows a hiker, Lars Monsen, through his year-round trip in the north of Scandinavia. The first two episodes are online, and the rest of the episodes follow as they are encoded.
Nordkalotten 365 had an average of nearly a million viewers through traditional broadcast, which makes it a rather popular in a country with the population of roughly 4,5 million. The show was downloaded more than 8 000 times in the first 24 hours after the BitTorrent release, and NRK received lot of positive feedback which might encourage the company to release other series via Internet as well.
The episodes are in MP4 file format without DRM protection, and are encoded with MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (bitrate 3 Mbit/s) using the Resolution 1024x576 at 25 fps.