700 free National Film Board movies online!
p2pnet news view | P2P | Movies:- “You are just 30 seconds away from a new Internet TV Experience. We have detected that you do not have all the requirements to access the TVOS interface which requires the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in. Click the button below to install it, then refresh this page.”
That was the message we got, yesterday, when we went to the national Film Board of Canada site to check out the online press conference for the launch of of the new NFB online screening room.
Fantastic idea!
But Damn! C’mon guys! Surely you could, at the very least, have used an open source application for your Canadian press conference to promote Canadian films to Canadians on your Canadian funded screening room designed specifically to allow not only Canadians, but Net users around the world, to watch 700 of your films for free online ?!
Forcing proprietary Microsoft stuff down people’s throats is a warped kind of censorship.
‘Never see the light of day ‘
BTAIM, part of a $1.3-million project to digitize the NFB’s historic films, it’s beautiful!
To give you an example of the kind of item you’ll find, the first (and so far only) feature I clicked was ‘Kanehsatake 270 Years of Resistance,’ a two-hour 1993 documentary in which director Alanis Obomsawin, “endured 78 nerve-wracking days and nights filming the armed stand-off between the Mohawks, the Québec police and the Canadian army.”
Classics such as Mon Oncle Antoine and Nobody Waved Goodbye are free for online screening, along with pioneering animation by Norman McLaren and animated films such as The Big Snit and The Cat Came Back, says the CBC.
“This is part of our ongoing response to the digital revolution,” sit has NFB chair Tom Permutter saying in Wednesday’s online news conference, the one I couldn’t see because I don’t want to have to use Microsoft viewing software, whether I like it or not.
“Many of these creators would never get a say and many works would never see the light of day without the help of the NFB,” he said, according to the CBC. “We have a tremendous responsibility to dig deeper, push boundaries. We can and must do things that cannot be done by the private sector.”
And, “We wanted to show the world our work – everything from our oldest films to the most contemporary and also to include films that represented all the regions of Canada and our cultural diversity,” said Deborah Drisdell, director of strategic planning.
The site features films in French and English and with special features for people with hearing or scene difficulties impaired and, “Perlmutter also urged the federal government to allocate money toward a digital strategy for Canada to keep up with the rest of the world,” says the story, adding:
“Britain, France and the Netherlands have all allocated money to preserve their films and make their collections available in digital format.”
Smoke and mirrors
I’ll be spending a lot of time here.
But, speaking of ‘never seeing the light of day,’ that’ll be possible only because Bell Canada isn’t my ISP.
And only because, unlike the majority of Bell Sympatico users, I have an uncapped business account under which streaming and downloading aren’t a problem.
“This NFB of Canada response to the digital revolution is all smoke and mirrors,” says p2pnet’s Ottawa Gal, who originally broke the Bell Canada traffic throttling scandal, going on »»»
Let’s be honest here. With the ridiculous low bit-caps and traffic throttling, these 700 films now available for screening online at NFB.ca will be useless to the average Canadian.
For the most part, those with the means to view them without being pocket-raped by the major Canadian telcos are people who don’t even live in Canada!
So in effect, the National Film Board created a service for Canadians that cannot be utilized by Canadians using Bell or Rogers (and maybe even wholesale providers if Bell gets its way).
A public (theoretically) CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) hearing into the Bell Canada ‘traffic management’ scandal is currently in hand.
Should the CRTC be powerfully and loudly asked to add the NFB situation into their deliberations?
And should Canadian film organisations become involved?
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
January , 2009
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January 22nd, 2009 at 9:55 am
i just had to deal with this silverlight crap when i wanted to check out some of details of windows 7 on ms mainpage. like hell am i installing yet another media/online media player/plugin. i mean. vlc/mpc/zoomplayer/wmp plugin/realplayer plugin/flash player plugin/quicktime plugin etc etc i sure as hell dont need to add anymore to the mix anytime soon
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:37 am
Thanx for the website
AND Internet Explorer is not necessary at all to view them. Mozilla with adobe flash plugin works great. This is with win98 through xp. Also tested with 4 flavors of Linux with no probs.
You NEVER want to use IE if you can use something much safer and better. The only thing IE is good for is your system updates, that’s it. And if you know how to, you can download the movies too
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:42 am
@ Hook:
The movies are no problem. But you needed Microsloth Silverlight for the press thingy.
Cheers!
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:50 pm
The problems we have with Canadian service providers is that they act like they’re the mob. They bully us, bully the government into having it their way. If they cannot provide the needed bandwidth for their customers then they should go back at what they used to do best. One is actually a phone company, go back and give us a phone service. The other is a cable company, provide us with cable content. Let the real companies that have the money and power to serve the Canadian public in the appropriate way. I still remember the I-Phone issues with Rogers and their greedy asses. Apple decided to sell the bulk of the phones already promised to Rogers to another client. One that had the guts to offer their proposed services as they were designed to be. Not the watered down Canadian services that cannot compete with the rest of the world. Make way to those that can actually offer us the real deal. Stop adding services to your already taxed networks and go back to what you do best, nothing!
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:41 pm
@ Jon
oh, my mistake
will ream them out, but good
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:58 pm
its not just the B/W, its how these telco’s are also shaping traffic. This year its P2P.
By 2010-2011 streaming video will over-take P2P, what then?
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Ditto X. You got that right. Canadians are being bent over all the time by Bell and Rogers. We have no competition here on the East Coast. I don’t know about the rest of Canada, but our choice here is Bell or the cable company. Period. And both seem to have almost the same prices for the same services. Hmmmmmm. Is that odd or what? Just like gasoline prices eh, no possibility that they kinda sorta keep the prices within a few cents of each other so there is basically no competition. Gasp!!!!! Say it isn’t so. We need the CRTC to either put up or shut up and disband. They sure are not there for the good of Canadian consumers. We need real ISP’s here, not these clowns hiding behind government laws made just for them. And I never allow IE to access the net, unless it is to do a MS update. I have my firewalls set to deny it access. Firefox rules in this house, with both windows and linux being used.
January 25th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
@ Jon
Emailed film board and got this back:
>Thanks for your feedback.
>
>Unfortunatly, we had to go to an oustide service provider for this
>event and, althought we asked for it, they could not deliver other
>alternatives to silverlight.
>
>We developped our site using a flash player to increase the
>accessibility and we agree that delivering the press conference
>using MS silverlight was not ideal. We will make the event
>available on our site through the flash player early next week.
>
>Best regards!
>
>xxxx xxxx
>Head of Interactive services and relational marketing
>National Film Board of Canada
March 3rd, 2009 at 8:28 pm
I live in the UK and manage to watch fine with XP and Firefox but one thing that bugs me is that none of the plug-ins are able to download the films, i installed loads of movie saving plug-ins but with no luck. Can anyone suggest a way of saving them to hard drive, it’s doimg my nut in and twisting my mellon. Thanks
March 10th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Hi, my name is Javier, I am from Argentina, and I have the same problem, I love Canada, and also I watch cbc/radio-canada.
I need that videos because I study English and French in my free times. I like Canadian history, coulture, etc.
Thanks