ABC’s cancellation of The One has forced schedule changes for CBC Television. Hustle, which had served as the Wednesday lead-in to The One, moves to Tuesday nights. Wednesdays will be home to feature films like Mission Impossible and Under the Tuscan Sun.

UPDATE: Just to reiterate (to help clarify some of the comments), CBC does not use any DRM.
CBC.ca offers over 25 different radio stations online for any internet user to listen to.
Being able to deliver so many stations to such a wide audience has many
challenges.
Step 1: Getting the Content
Because of the way the CBC Radio network is set up, not all of the Radio One and Radio Two feeds flow through Toronto. In order to get around that problem we use the CBC wide area network (the network that attaches all of the offices together) to get our encoded data back to the streaming server in Toronto.
The encoder is a rack mounted machine located in the Radio Central Equipment Room in each region. Some regions however (like the northern ones) is available via satellite back in Toronto. In those cases, we just keep the encoder in Toronto.
Step 2: Encoding the Content
All of the Radio streams are encoded in windows media format using Windows Media Encoder in each region. Each encoder encodes two streams, a high bitrate (32kb/s) and a low bitrate (16kb/s).
Windows media was chosen for several reasons:
- Rights Management. Unlike with the MP3 or Ogg format, Windows Media allows us to apply digital rights management rules to our live streams. Although no such rules currently exist, it does leave the possibility open in the future.
- Robustness. The streams are delivered using RTSP or MMS. Two protocols that were designed to deliver real time data. Using RTSP/MMS over HTTP (which is how MP3s are delivered) also allows us that extra layer of “protection” against users who want to steal our content. It’s harder to rip data delivered over RTSP/MMS than it is over HTTP (however, still possible).
- Scalability. Being a news organization, CBC.ca experiences huge spikes in bandwidth and demand when there is breaking news. Using windows media and windows media server allows to to meet that demand. I’ll explain how shortly.
- Support. CBC has a mandate(http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/B-9.01/) to “be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means..”. The majority of computer users in Canada use Windows and are able to support playing Windows Media streams. Using a format that allowed a user to listen to CBC Radio online without having to download a 3rd party application (Real Player, Winamp, iTunes) fulfilled our mandate.
Step 3: Delivering the Content
All of the servers that run CBC.ca are located in Toronto. This is where
all of the encoded streams are delivered to.
CBC.ca peers with an Internet exchange called TorIX(http://www.torix.net/). An Internet Exchange (IX) allows ISPs to pass traffic between one another for free. If a user is on TorIX (that is, they use an ISP that CBC peers with at TorIX) then all of the traffic for the radio stream will come from CBC.ca servers in Toronto.
On the other hand, if a user is not on TorIX, then they will be directed to servers located elsewhere. If all of CBC.ca’s servers are full (because of a high demand) users will then be directed to the Akamai(http://www.akamai.net) network to get the stream.
Akamai is a Content Distribution Network(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Distribution_Network) that CBC.ca uses to deliver content to end users in the most efficient means possible.
All of this is possible by software that was developed in house. It allows us to provide it with business rules (an example rule would be: only send users to server B when they are on TorIX and Server C and D are full) to ensure that the end user gets the best experience for the lowest cost to CBC.ca.
When you request a streaming asx file. The software does its magic and then rewrites the contents of that asx file on the fly. Your player then reads the asx file and fetches the content from the server.
This software was so successful that myself plus others who worked on it received a CBC.ca Award of Excellence(http://intranet/awards/online/awardsofexcellence/2004.htm) in 2004.
UPDATE: Just to reiterate (to help clarify some of the comments), CBC does not use any DRM.