We've got a big announcement for the fans of our show! On March 24th after the broadcast of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister (airs March 23rd at 7 pm on CBC Television) we’ll be the 1st major broadcaster in North America to release a high quality, DRM-free copy of a primetime show using BitTorrent technology. We’ll also be distributing a version you can put in your iPod.

The show will be completely free (and legal) for you to download, share & burn to your heart’s desire.

Nope, we’re not lying.

This year’s show really began online. CBC was the first Canadian broadcaster to use YouTube to cast our show where our results were:

• 144 people auditioned
• 500+ videos (video responses made this the largest online political debate in Canadian history)
• 270,000+ views
• 2500 comments

Facebook was big too with over 7500 members joining 50 groups about the show. We also created a dozen behind-the-scenes Podcasts showcasing our 10 semi-finalists who were hand picked from our YouTube search.

It’s fitting that our final show be distributed online too. (Special thanks to BoingBoing for planting this idea in our fearless leader’s head by running this story.)

We hope that you watch the show this Sunday and enjoy it enough that you’d like a copy. Simply head back to the official show site (cbc.ca/nextprimeminister) on Monday morning where we’ll have BitTorrent files ready for you to download, along with some instructions on how to do so.

Do you think this is a good idea/bad idea? Would you like to see more shows distributed this way? Leave a comment & let us know what you think.

UPDATE (3/21/08 6 pm EST): Many people have been asking about the quality & format of the files we'll be providing. Please note that the show does not exist as HD (even on TV). The large file will use the Xvid codec and the mobile (iPod) file will use H.264.

UPDATE (3/24/06 11 pm EST): The torrents are up! Click here to get the files.