Ordinary Gweilo

The BBC has made an interesting announcement:

Hundreds of episodes of BBC programmes will be made available for free on a file-sharing network for the first time, the corporation has announced.

The move follows a deal between the commercial arm of the organisation, BBC Worldwide, and technology firm Azureus.

The agreement means that users of Azureus’ Zudeo software in the US can download titles such as Little Britain.

The headline says said "free", but the story seems to contradict this: 

No pricing structure for the BBC content on Zudeo has been revealed.

It seems rather unlikely that the BBC would make Little Britain available for free when they are also selling DVDs commercially.  There’s also a press release from Azureus that talks about ‘premium content’, which is usually code for charging money.  I think the confusion may have arisen because Azureus developed a BitTorrent client, which some naughty people may have used to download programmes illegally.  The latest idea is to use the same infrastructure to sell content, though it remains to be seen whether this will work. 

UPDATE: They have changed it so that it no longer says ‘for free’.  Whilst they’re correcting errors, shouldn’t it be "Azureus’s Zudeo software"?  And I hope that’s the last time I have to type those horrible names…

As usual, it seems that this will be limited to users in the USA, at least initially.  Viewers in the UK can already access many BBC programmes from the BBC website (for free).  And Hong Kong?  I’m not holding my breath.