The National Film Board of Canada has decided to put up hundreds of its films online. Bravo! Excellent! Thunderous applause! However, there is a dark side to this. The films can only be viewed by streaming them which means that Adobe's Flash is in use. If you, like me, cannot properly view Flash files or wish to watch the movies later on while out in the woods with a laptop but no internet connection, you are out of luck.
Of course the National Film Board has thought of this, and wishes to make things easier for people and what could be easier than purchasing a DVD! Once you click the “Buy it now” you are taken to a page where you have to select what type of user you are: a home user, or a school/library/corporation/etc. I guess they want you to pay more if you're going to be showing the film to others. However, the Film Board also fails with this alternative. If you are a corporate user and wish to purchase “Here's Hockey”, an 11 minute film, it will cost you $50...and you get the movie on VHS. 
If you are a home user, you can buy that same 11 minute film for $15 on DVD.
Someone else has a different complaint about the use of Flash: upgrading. They say they would be forced to upgrade their version of Mac OS X to the latest which means paying ~$200 just to upgrade to the latest version of Flash. This is consumer lock-in and should not be encouraged by a federal agency.
The National Film Board of Canada is a federal cultural agency whose mandate is “to produce and distribute and to promote the production and distribution of films designed to interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations”. That mandate doesn't include the promotion of a proprietary platform, Flash, and charging an obscene amount for DVD copies, does it? The best way to promote Canadian films produced by the National Film Board, and paid for by tax-payers, is to allow them to be downloaded. Let people download the videos for free in the Theora (which has no licensing or royalty fees) or the MPEG format.
