TV documentary downloads: a brave new world?

So finally we're getting somewhere with this digital technology. I received an email a few hours ago advertising the fact that a documentary airing tonight on Channel 4 about Guantanamo Bay will be available for digital download as soon as the show starts.

It is available from ISP Tiscali's brand new cinema service. It will cost £2.99 to “rent” and £4.99 to buy. It is 650MB in size, widescreen, near-DVD quality and will take about an hour to download on a fast connection. You can get it at www.tiscali.co.uk/guantanamo.

[Update 11.15pm: It was made available after the end of the film. The process has worked smoother than my earlier experience with a different film (see below). Seems to be downloading fine – although I have been forced to rely on Explorer's own download tool – not something this is a great idea for such a large file.]

This is great news. Great for viewers, great for film-makers and therefore great for journalism and by extension society. It's been a while coming but the technology is here, the systems are here and with new, faster Net connections the speeds are here to make downloading films a real-world possibility.

Obviously this has been possible for a while. You've been able to Bittorrent films for years. And then there are all the movie download systems that the film companies have been working on for ages. And I'd better mention the video iPod before the Mac maniacs start frothing. But somehow with the news that The Road to Guantanamo will be made available for download comes a real sense of this finally happening.

(Incidentally, if you want the real lowdown on Guantanamo Bay, David Rose's book is an absolute must. Check out his website at Guantanamo.co.uk (which I built, incidentally).)

And that means the infrastructure is being built that will enable the economics of documentary making (and in future, TV and film) to be radically altered. No longer will commissioning editors be the make-or-break for a film. A film-maker confident that his film has an audience can take the project on himself and use proceeds from individual sales for finance (or, more likely, persuade people to invest or loan). It provides a fantastic shift in the balance of power.

I know several documentary makers who are talented, hard-working, committed and passionate and, crucially, who are have important and interesting projects but spend months chasing grants and being turned down by commissioning eds, before they can even start. It's soul destroying. Even if you do get a commission, you find that you have to make compromise after compromise.

Even good commissioning editors are twisted by power over time. A mad form of ego-mania forms where the editor persuades himself that how his mind works on any given day is directly analogous to the collective sub-conscious of society. They decide on a rainy Tuesday that they've had enough of Guantanamo Bay and that immediately becomes “viewers don't want to see that” or “viewers already knows what goes on” or another similar nonsense.

With a direct route to an individual, bypassing the bottleneck of TV, not only can film-makers retain integrity, they can make money, and vitally, go to commissioning editors on their own terms: “It has already been downloaded 6,580 times, by people who have given it an average rating of 8.4. I'm happy to cut the scenes you mentioned if you want to air it before 9pm, but I'm afraid I'm not re-cutting the end of the film, it's a complete piece. And I want £5,000 more than you're offering for first-air rights.”

As people are consistently pointing out these days, the creativity stops where the constraints begin. And creativity has great market potential.

US rumblings

There are smatterings of this already in the US. Robert Greenwald and his Brave New Films production company has knocked out three films that have sold extremely well on DVD, advertised and sold through his website.

I have all three – Uncovered: The War on Iraq; Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism; and Wal-Mart: The high cost of low price.

All three serve a vital function – they expose unpleasant facts about very powerful people and corporations. What is notable is that these films would never be allowed to appear in the mainstream media *because* of the power of the people the films cover and the fact that the media is now a large corporate being.

Ignoring the fact that the Wal-Mart film isn't very good (the other two are superb), Greenwald has had a very real impact in the US. And it was originally all due to word of mouth, with the Internet acting as the meeting room.

Brave New Films announced last week that it was now acting as the distributor to an independent film that covers corruption in the US Congress: “The Big Buy: How Tom Delay stole Congress.” Something solid is building.

For some strange reason, people always claim that cultural shifts like this mean revolution and the status quo will be brought to its knees. God knows why. But the fact is that shifts in power help reform out-of-date, decaying and sometimes corrupt institutions.

A strong and viable independent film-making industry will cause a bend in the media, and that can only be a good thing.

But I'm getting way ahead of myself. What about this Guantanamo download?

Opening doors but closing Windows and shutting Gates

Well, as ever with new things, it's not all good news.

The worst news is that I haven't be able to get it to work yet. I have signed up (the signing up process was a hassle), and I've paid for a film (some Michael Caine film I've never heard of) and yet I simply can't get the download to work.

The bad news (as opposed to the worst news) has alot to do with this and that is: to use the service at all you have to do it through both Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Basically, it's a Microsoft closed house. This isn't good because it simply swaps one form of control for another: if this system were to become the norm, Microsoft can start dictating its own terms.

It also isn't good because Explorer is a crap browser. There is no reason why the system shouldn't work in Firefox or Opera, except for the fact Microsoft has set up the system only to work with its own browser.

Also I keep getting the same error message – and I can't tell whether this is Tiscali's fault or Microsoft's. It could be Tiscali has its systems badly configured and it is conflicting with something. Or it could be that Microsoft has so tightly integrated and controlled the system that something on my laptop is getting in the way. I have cleared the path as much as is possible, and it still won't download.

I have eventually got it going by downloading and installing some third-party software suggested by Tiscali – Freshdownload from Fresh Devices. Although I still had to grab the URL for the download and paste it into Freshdownload. There doesn't appear to be a simple button connection between the two. I know that this seemingly simple step would stump a very large number of Net users.

These are bugs that have to be ironed out. But the good thing is that the deal for downloading was done between the Guantanamo documentary makers production company, Revolution Films, and Tiscali. Channel 4 doesn't have the infrastructure.

If everyone can actually get it to work, we may well be entering a glorious new world of media. I'm very pleased aI did my BBC filming course now. I sense a documentary or two coming…