As a part-time political nerd, I'm keen to keep informed about British politics, particularly in the run-up to a general election. I do a lot of reading, but I also watch programmes like the leaders' debates.
I'm a registered voter, but I happen to live overseas. Given the sorry state of global television distribution by television channels, that causes some hiccups.
I'm not concerned that I can't get access to these videos; with a fair dose of technical knowledge it's pretty simple. I am concerned that it is wrong to make it harder than it need be for any potential voter to get informed.
I hope that for the upcoming debates, the television channels will make them available to all, as easily as possible. If you agree, please let them know (see the links at the foot of this post).
I'd like to be an informed voter, so I went to ITV's site to try and watch the video a few hours after it was broadcast:
The BBC repeated it the following day, and gave me a more sensible error message:
Fortunately, while I'm a part-time political nerd, I'm a full-time technical nerd. By this point I have already watched the damn thing. It is important to remember that when you attempt to make internet packets pay attention to national boundaries that there is nothing in the fundamental protocols that make that work.
There are plenty of nerdy ways of routing around these things. I see that a couple of the BitTorrent trackers had copies up within a couple of hours of the broadcast. For me, the simplest route was to run…
% ssh -D 12345 acomputerintheuk.example.org
… and point the SOCKS proxy on my laptop at localhost:12345. Lo, my browser is coming 'from the UK'.
Access to our democracy should be as wide as possible, and should certainly try and reach all eligible voters. A good number of those are overseas, so we should avoid using technological 'speed-bumps' that never forestall pirates, but do get in the way of reasonable users.
Are there really rights holders who feel very strongly that they cannot air this globally? Does anyone really expect there is money to be made syndicating British political debates overseas?
If you agree, and want any voter in the upcoming election to be able to easily watch the upcoming debates, please let the broadcasters know:
- ITV hosted the first debate, last Thursday, on Domestic Affairs: Contact ITV.com / ITV Player.
- Sky News host the second debate on Thursday 22nd on International Affairs: Contact Sky News.
- BBC News host the third and final debate on Thursday 29th about Financial Affairs: Contact BBC News.
If I get any meaningful responses, I will post them here.
Update at 07:39 EDT, 23rd April 2010.
I got an odd response from ITV saying:
Unfortunately we have to use geo-blocking software in order for us to comply with the terms of our online broadcast and content licences.
However, viewers outside of the UK can view the Election debate on the ITV1 YouTube channel;
We hope this is of assistance.
The YouTube link was also broken from Canada, but they have now fixed that. More odd is what they can possibly mean by 'content licenses' if they are also able to post it online for global consumption. I'll post the whole conversation if it goes anywhere.
Sky have helpfully posted a video of the second debate on their World-Wide Web site (as the first two Ws matter). Congrats Sky.
A comment on my brother's call for the live debates to be more accessible to all pointed out that C-SPAN air the debates, and so put the videos up on their perfectly sane, global web site. Find them via their British coverage.
Tagged: Rants, Distribution, Media, Politics, Technology, Web
Posted at 09:09 EDT, 18th April 2010.
Last changed at 09:10 EDT, 18th April 2010.
Update at 07:39 EDT, 23rd April 2010 – Some success
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