Digital rights managment key to offering CineRoute to public, says NFB head

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is taking steps to make its tens thousands of films available to the general public over high speed networks, but first it must clear the tricky issue of digital rights. Sandra Macdonald, the NFB’s president says work on both digital rights standards at the international level, and negotiations on the home front with artists’ collectives, have to be solved before a widespread, on-demand system for film distribution can be made available to the public. Since 1999, the NFB has been making around 800 films available to Canadian universities through its CineRoute pilot project. The test streams video over the CA*net 3 backbone built by CANARIE Inc to classrooms connected to the network. The initiative has several important implications for the agency, both on the economic and educational fronts. Budget cuts in the 90s led to the closing of the storefront lending libraries that traditionally served the educational market. "So, we are serving those people less well than we used to, so we regard this as a way to bring back a level of service to our educational clients that we had to reduce for budgetary reasons," Macdonald says. She adds that while the test is limited to universities that can guarantee bandwidth, it’s hoped the pilot can be extended to elementary and high schools before 2003 before offering it to the broader Canadian public. There are still some hurdles to overcome before that happens. Macdonald says there is a large collection of titles for which no Internet rights have been negotiated. CineRoute was made possible, she says, because the collectives which hold many of the rights have agreed to allow the streaming of many titles without charge as an experiment. That’s important, she says, because no meaningful negotiations on rights can be accomplished until more is known about how people use film content online. For example, she notes that people watching films online in streaming format tend to behave differently than they would when using other platforms. Zapping, the ability to quickly stop one film and load another if the content doesn’t meet their needs, is more common when viewing online. Armed with that knowledge, and as more research is done through the project, the rights-holders and the NFB can hammer out more meaningful rights agreements. Piracy is an obvious concern, Macdonald says, and the NFB is working with an International Standards Organization initiative called the International Standard Audiovisual Number (ISAN), which will eventually embed watermarks in the form of unique identifiers for films and other content. The NFB has also done extensive work in-house to develop a digital rights management (DRM) system to track the distribution of content. Macdonald says other federal agencies have begun discussing using the infrastructure for their own copyrighted holdings. Bandwidth is also an impediment to offering the board’s holdings to the public-at-large, she says. While the NFB has learned to offer films in several formats to account for differences in connection speeds, she says many of the schools connected to networks through projects such as SchoolNet continue to have inadequate desktop equipment to properly display the content. "One of the things we don’t want to do is offer a bad image," she says. Macdonald says CineRoute is costing the NFB about $1 million per year, and work done this year on rights management and setting up an ecom infrastructure will come in around $500,000-$600,000 – a one-time charge. Otherwise, technical services comprise approximately 12 per cent of the NFB’s budget, or about $5 million per year. Those services, including staff and infrastructure, are part of the larger cost of producing films, she says. A full copy of the National Film Board’s strategic plan, Rewind and Fast Forward, is available at http://www.nfb.ca/E/1/2/00-212.html

Digital rights managment key to offering CineRoute to public, says NFB head

Broadcast | March 8, 2001

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