Miro

A year ago, NRK, Norway’s public broadcaster, ran a highly successful distribution test, making high-resolution, full length, DRM-free programming available over Bittorrent. The experiment made their viewers very happy, and also saved NRK tens of thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs.

Yesterday, NRK continued on their highly innovative path and launched a Bittorrent tracker themselves. During their first experiment, they used Amazon.com’s tracker. Now that they run their own server, they will have extra detailed statistics and metrics about who is downloading and sharing their programming. They say:

“By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we’re the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it.”

The television show they launched with is called, “Der ingen skulle tru at nokon kunne bu.” It’s a six episode series about people living in remote places in Norway. When announcing the newly downloadable program, they recommended Miro as the easiest way to watch.

The folks at NRK I’ve been in touch with say they’ll keep innovating and that they’re working on adding more programming. NRK penetrates 25% of the Norwegian population (roughly one million viewers), and so their reach with this effort is significant.

Also, we’ll be working, with NRK, on a custom branded version of Miro — we’ll keep you posted.

Last Saturday we passed the mark of one million users within a month! It makes me want to end every sentence with an exclamation point! But I won’t, because I care.

The precise number as of yesterday, was 1,045,437 within the prior month, up from 277,272 the month before. This number came from Google Analytics for www.miroguide.com, the home page for Miro. Given that 99% of visits to Miro Guide come through the Miro client, this approximates Miro users pretty well.

As you might imagine, we’re pretty happy about this. But we still have a ton of work in front of us. The product has a lot of room for improvement, and we need to increase our revenue significantly in order to stay competitive.

With regard to revenue, we’re looking at a few options including selling independent content and sponsorships. If you know (a) independent filmmakers looking for outlets or (b) sponsors with a good fit for Miro, please contact me at jessep [at] pculture.org.

We’ve just released Miro 2.0.2, which is translated into more languages and has many bug fixes. Full details are in the release notes. As always, you can download Miro here.

We strive to make Miro accessible to as many people around the world as possible– if you speak a non-English language, we would love your help translating Miro, the Miro Guide, and our website. It’s surprisingly easy to jump in and do a little bit. You can get started here.

It’s annoying when you find an obviously non-HD channel marked as HD! That’s why we’ve got a flagging system — anyone can mark a channel so moderators can clean things up.

What is HD? – Technically it means a resolution of 1080×720 or higher. We’re somewhat lenient, when it comes down to it, but will become stricter as more and more true HD content comes online. Shows should have more than 90% HD content (occasional non-HD videos mixed in is OK), in order to be marked as HD.

How Can You Help? – Just tag stuff that is obviously not HD. Our moderators will check out the stuff that gets the most flags, and if it’s under the minimum requirement, we’ll pull it out of the HD section.