The cover story in today’s HKET ITTimes is Education via the Internet. There is an article on the RTHK eTVonline website, claiming 1.5M visits per day. However, I find some of their practices strange. I paraphrase Ms Chan, the Website Manager, from the article:-
All the programmes used to be available for download for free, but a parent downloaded tens of programmes non-stop, leading to problems with copyright and usage on the programmes, so all the programmes may now only be streamed.
She went further:-
Any school needing our contents could write to us, stating that the programmes will only be used for education and not commercial purposes, and we would be glad to help.
I am not too sure Ms Chan has taken proper legal advice. Not that I am qualified to give any.
The big question is, do they want wide distribution for everyone or do they want control so they could exploit their contents?
The way I see it, production of the programmes have already been paid for with taxpayers’ money. The target audiences are the general public. So they would want distribution to be as wide as possible, instead of putting artificial barriers to access via streaming, at the same time paying big bucks for Windows server and Real server licences. If I were the Website Manager, I would make sure that all the programmes are available for download on all the university public ftp servers, as well as putting them up for download via Bittorrent. This would help with the big server load and the bandwidth cost a lot.
Ms Chan could do a lot worse than checking out BBC’s website. Most of the BBC materials are going to be available with a Creative Commons Licence. RTHK may consider a similar scheme, where all the ETV materials are available for free non-commercial use and distribution. Any party wanting to use any ETV material commercially will need to negotiate for a licence.
Ms Chan also revealed that sales of the rights to ETV materials is their main income. Well the lo-res web version is free, while they can easily sell a hi-res version at a reasonable cost.
Ironically, I went to the site trying to watch some programmes. No luck. The programmes are all “will be available soon”. Crap.
Disclaimer: all translation errors and mis-intrepretation are strictly mine.