A recent report from the lobby group ‘Friends of Canadian Broadcasting’ exaggerates the amount of foreign programming on the CBC.

According to Ian Morrison, a spokesperson for the group, “A full 25% of CBC’s prime time schedule is now devoted to foreign, mostly American, programs.”

^{A graph showing the number of hours of Canadian content on CBC TV during the spring season.}

Morrison made that remark on June 30th as the organization released a report examining the amount of foreign programming on the CBC between Feb 21st and March 13th, 2009.

What the report didn’t say however, is that the amount of foreign programming on the CBC varies widely according to what’s on the schedule in any given week. Although it’s true that there was 25 per cent foreign content on the network during the weeks they studied, more half the time that percentage drops to about 18 per cent.

It all depends what’s movie is playing in the Sunday night movie slot. If it’s a foreign movie, running for two hours, then you get 25 per cent foreign content for that week. If it’s a Canadian movie, which more than half of them are, then the amount of foreign content drops to 18 per cent. (Click here to see the Spring 2009 schedule).

The report also says “Canadian content during prime time on CBC English TV has reached a 20-year low.” But it’s worth noting that the real low point for foreign programming on the CBC was reached in 1981, 28 years ago, when more than 40 per cent of the schedule was foreign (click here to see the 1981 schedule).

In the eighties the CBC schedule looked a lot like an American network with shows like M*A*S*H, WKRP, Three’s Company, Mork & Mindy and Happy Days filling almost half the slots.

By the mid-nineties, the CBC had reversed course and introduced an all-Canadian lineup, but the prime-time audience share suffered, which is why CBC executives made the decision to bring back some American shows into the lineup.

What do you think? Should the CBC go back to airing as much Canadian content as possible, or should it stick to its current approach of about 80 per cent Canadian content?

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	CBC Television, Programming	Posted at 12:10 pm (02 Jul 2009)

Yahoo has decided to stop supporting the CBC’s online video content management system, known as Maven.

The California-based search and web services company made the decision to shelve Maven last week. The sudden move will force the CBC to find a new video software provider by year-end.

The CBC had entered into a relationship with Maven Networks prior to the later’s acquisition by Yahoo in 2008 for $160 million.

Now the CBC must scramble to switch several thousand videos to a new content provider and figure out a transition plan in next several months. Nevertheless, the move is being well received at the CBC, many of the producers that used the Maven product were unhappy with it.

What did you think of Maven?

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	CBC.ca web site	Posted at 7:45 am (30 Jun 2009)

Current TV has been granted a channel license by the CRTC.

In Current TV will be joint venture between Al Gore’s Current TV channel and the CBC. According to the CRTC decision the CBC owns an 80 per cent interest of Current TV’s Canadian branch corporation.

Current TV is a hybrid television network and web site that airs both content submitted by users and professionally produced content. The web site ranks the online submissions. The most popular have the greatest chance of making it to air. To comply with the CRTC license, 35 per cent of the user-submitted content must be Canadian.

CBC now requires approval from the Treasury Board in order to proceed with launching the channel. This application is expected to take place in the fall.

The full details of the license decision are available here.

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	Platforms	Posted at 11:16 am (10 Jun 2009)

MONDAY UPDATE: The results are in. Radio 3 listeners have voted 77% to 23% in favor of a 100% all Canadian CBC Radio 3.

For the last few days a debate was raging over at CBC Radio 3 about how much non-Canadian content should be on the “air” at their single surviving station. As John Paolozzi wrote on the Radio 3 blog “Currently we have two separate radio stations. One web. One satellite. Due to budget cuts we will merge the two stations into one on Monday, June 15th.”

The web station currently features a 100% Canadian mix, whereas the satellite feed is an 85% Canadian 15% international mix.

The question is… which path do we follow? Do we include some international music on our web stream, or do we change our satellite station to 100% Canadian?

However as the North by East West blog explains, this isn’t a final decision, but while be taken into consideration by the Radio 3 management.

Wether it’s final decision or not, you have to admire the way they make decisions over there.

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 7:10 pm (08 Jun 2009)

CBC radio continued its winning streak with the latest spring 2009 book. Although down slightly from the winter 2009 survey, CBC Radio One’s overall share 19 per cent higher than this time last year.

Of the seven markets surveyed both CBC Radio One stations and their respective morning shows rank either first or second. Both World Report (at 7 a.m.) and As it Happens had an outstanding book, with share increase of more than 30 per cent over this time last year.

Here’s a graph of the CBC Radio One share since last year in Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver:

CBC Radio in Vancouver had a particularly good showing, passing CKNW for the market lead. ”This is the highest ranking we’ve had in recent memory, in the last 20 years, and as far as I remember this is the first time we’ve been the top station overall,” said Johnny Michel, managing director of CBC British Columbia told the Vancouver Sun. 

Here is Ottawa, Toronto and Winnipeg:

BBM defines share as the estimated total hours tuned to one station as a percentage of total hours tuned to all stations. Of course share only captures people who listen to radio.

CBC Radio 2’s share is about the same as the last survey.

The full survey is available here.

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	CBC Radio 1, CBC Radio 2	Posted at 4:40 pm (03 Apr 2009)

CBC’s senior management team is holding a third-quarter update on the state of CBC finances tomorrow. The update is expected to address how the CBC plans to deal with a large drop in revenue.

According to an email from CBC President Hubert Lacroix, ad revenues were 17 per cent lower than forecast for fiscal 2008. The note says: “we are now projecting a shortfall in advertising revenue that will be in the $55-$65 million dollar range.”

And it gets worse.

Lacroix added “The more pressing issue is our budget for 2009-2010. The combination of a severe slump in our commercial revenues, coupled with rising costs of production, is a menacing test that will demand some tough choices on our part.”

According to the note some of the choices may affect jobs, services and programs but “Nothing has yet been determined,” Lacroix wrote.

The update will be held in the Glenn Gould Studio, in Toronto, Tuesday, Feb. 24, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. ET. Employees that can’t make it in person can tune in on the in-house channel or dial in. For more information on that click here.

Lacroix ended the note by addressing Greg Weston’s story in The Sun from yesterday.

Lacroix said Weston “horrendously distorted the facts and suggested we’ve been looking to Government for “hand-outs,” which is precisely what we HAVE NOT been asking for.”

A CBC press release added Weston did not check any of his facts with the CBC before publishing the article. Having read the article this morning I was surprised that it made it past the editing desk, giving the single source and inaccuracies.

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	CBC Television, Executives, Financial, The Media Landscape	Posted at 2:36 pm (23 Feb 2009)

If you’ve been working on a pitch for the CBC News Renewal process, the deadline has been extended to February 20th.

According to a note from Jennifer McGuire, “We heard from many people who are still working on pitches for Newsworld Primetime. So, we have decided to extend the deadline for those proposals to the end of [this] week. Send them to newsrenewal@cbc.ca no later than Friday February 20″

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	CBC Newsworld, News & Journalism	Posted at 12:25 pm (16 Feb 2009)

Allegations from Manitoba aboriginal leaders that the CBC has provided a forum for hatred and racism on it’s web site have grown into a full scale debate between hate speech on one hand and freedom of speech and censorship on the other.

The leaders, which represent dozens of aboriginal bands, made the allegations after a year-long study of several news sites. One of the comments which they documented read: “Native people do not have the knowledge to look after a house. Build them a teepee seeing they were better off 300 years ago.”

When CBC News posted the story on its web site headlined: “First Nations chiefs say comments on CBC website forum for hate,” hundreds of comments started appearing on the page debating the merits of the accusations. On Thursday night the story had over 200 comments and was the most commented story on cbc.ca.

Many of the comments echoed the thought that the aboriginal leaders were blurring the lines between criticism and hatred. “I don’t think people’s opinions should be counted as racist because they may be negative in nature,” MikeNike wrote in what was the most recommended comment on the story. “This sounds like intimidation to me… Dissenting points of view are not hate speech,” another commentator GlobalWarmingNews.ca added. I should add that the CBC story did not contain the comments that sparked the allegations.

Nevertheless the story illustrates a problem that many media outlets are struggling with - sometimes the online comments become the story. And when that happens it introduces some thorny legal questions.

A media law professor told the Globe said that the CBC could be liable for the comments: “If you are screening the comments, you are responsible,” said Dean Jobb, assistant professor of Journalism at King’s College. But others disagree wether the CBC would be on the hook and most agree that the issue lies in a legal grey area than has not been mapped.

The problem becomes even more acute for the CBC because part of it’s mandate is to promote discussion among Canadians, and comments on news stories are a extremely effective way to do that.

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	CBC.ca web site, News & Journalism	Posted at 10:07 pm (12 Feb 2009)

In a letter to the Ottawa Citizen, former CBC President Tony Manera, said he objected to ads on CBC Radio.

The possibility of advertising on CBC radio is not a new idea. It has been considered and rejected in the past, for valid reasons.

The traditional distinctiveness of CBC radio would be further eroded by the presence of commercials. That insidious process, unfortunately, has been underway for some time. In a well intentioned, but poorly executed effort to broaden the traditional base of CBC radio listeners, many of its most loyal supporters, upon whom the CBC’s survival as a public broadcaster depends, have become disenchanted, discouraged, disengaged and pretty darn unhappy…

One of the most irritating features, on both CBC radio and television, is the incessant running of “promos” and “trailers” telling us what’s coming up next, or later, or tomorrow, or next week.

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	CBC Radio 1, CBC Radio 2, Executives, People	Posted at 4:24 pm (11 Feb 2009)

In response to Heritage Minister James Moore comments on advertising on CBC Radio, Michel Tremblay, senior VP of corporate strategy said today that advertising on CBC Radio “is not currently being considered.”

But others say that Moore’s comments amount to an invitation for CBC management to look at advertising on CBC Radio as a way to make up the looming budget shortfall.

Charlie Angus, the NDP heritage critic, who raised the issue with on Monday told the Globe that he was surprised by Moore’s comments. “He revealed his government’s inclination to support the introduction of commercials on CBC Radio.”

A CBC press release said Moore’s comments come on the heels of a series of meetings between the CBC and the Feds “to obtain some flexible financial measures” that will help the corp “to alleviate the burden of the recession.”

The CBC has long pressed for more flexible mechanisms to raise revenue, including last year’s failed bid to introduce subsriber fees. A submission to the CRTC in 2007 said “In the Corporation’s view, no service should be subject to regulatory constraints which would preclude it from generating sufficient revenues from the service it provides.”

Advertising on CBC Radio would require CRTC approval, and there’s some speculation that Moore’s comments may have been intended to encourage the CBC to submit a request.

Both the Globe and the Star have more on the subject.

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	CBC Radio 1, CBC Radio 2, Parliament, The CRTC	Posted at 12:05 am (11 Feb 2009)

Heritage Minister James Moore hinted yesterday that advertising on CBC Radio “is an option.” The Minister made the comments during an exchange with NDP heritage critic Charlie Angus, but then seemed to back away from them. Below is a transcript of the exchange:

Charlie Angus: Would you consider opening CBC Radio One and Radio Two up for commercial advertising?

James Moore: Yeah I mean, CBC has a lot of pressure… Look we’re working with Hubert Lacroix and people at CBC in order to get a full sense of the scale of the problems that they have. Commercial advertising is an option  that has been talked about for some time. I would frankly consider anything so long as the end result is to have a strong national public broadcaster that serves Canadians as best as possible.

Charlie Angus: So you would consider opening advertising onto Radio One and Radio Two? That has been discussed?

James Moore: It has not been discussed with CBC - Radio Canada. It’s not something that I’m looking at doing. But we are very conscious of the needs of the CBC - the pressures that they’re facing. I would work with them on any option that they think would work to best serve their mandate in serving Canadians.

The Minister made the comments during a heritage committee hearing that’s online here, scroll along to the 1:12:11 mark to watch it.

Advertising revenue currently accounts for about 20 per cent of total CBC funding. Although some advertising already exists on CBC Radio, such as podcast sponsorships and ads on radio web sites, CBC Radio earns very little money from these deals. CBC Radio’s total budget for 2009 is around $140 million, of which less than $1 million is from self-generated revenue.

Ian Morrison, spokesperson for the watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, told the Citizen Radio One and Two ads could generate up to $95 million a year.

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	CBC Radio 1, CBC Radio 2, Parliament, The CRTC	Posted at 12:44 pm (10 Feb 2009)

There have been some subtle changes to the site that havn’t really been advertised. I’ve taken a moment to outline them for you:

Mobile Site Revamp
There were two major changes to our mobile website. The first was the outsourcing of the site to a third party called Quattro Wireless. They allow us to automatically reformat the mobile site depending on which device you are using. So the site you see on your Blackberry will be formatted for the Blackberry. While a visitor from a cell phone will have the cell phone version of the site displayed to them properly.

The second change we made was to automatically detect if users are coming from a mobile device if they visit www.cbc.ca. If they are, then they will automatically be directed to our mobile site: m.cbc.ca. There were a few bugs with this auto-redirection, but they have been ironed out this week.

This way, you have one url you need to remember: cbc.ca. If you visit from a phone, blackberry, or desktop, you will automatically be sent to either the mobile or regular website.

Flash Video
We have had flash video on the site for a while now. We’ve recently rolled this out to the news areas of the site, specifically The National.

This new video format allows us to provide higher quality video at a lower bit rate. It also allows us to almost guarantee that the video will be played on all platforms as the flash format is supported in most browsers.

You can expect to see Flash video to slowly replace all the windows and real media video on the site. We are currently testing live streaming with the flash player as well.

Anything Else?
There are some pretty cool projects going on that I will reveal over the course of this year as they roll out. So stay tuned!

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	, CBC.ca web site, Under the Hood	Posted at 1:31 pm (06 Feb 2009)

A study that looks at the online buzz generated by Canada’s top media outlets has CBC ahead by a mile.

The study looks at online mentions and comments posted on blogs, forums, social networks and social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Myspace and many others. CBC’s web sites generated both the most mentions and the most comments.

The CBC site received almost double the number of mentions of it’s closest competitor, the Globe and Mail, with 2,858 mentions, versus the Globe’s 1,501 mentions.

But it was in the comments that cbc.ca really excelled. The site received almost four times the number of comments of its nearest competitor.

CBC.ca leads the pack in social media buzz

The authors of the study, Chicago-based Cision, said comments to the links are relevant because it shows that people who use social networking features on the web are engaged with the content.

Jay Krall, Cision’s manager of Internet media research, said while ad budgets shrink, blogs and other buzz-generating online content like video are the future in news.

“Any advertiser who’s looking at social metrics is already a step ahead,” he says. While traditional measuring of eyeballs and clicks is still relevant, the social media ranking provides more information as to the engagement and reach of online content, he adds.

The research was done for Media in Canada, you can read more about it here.

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	CBC.ca web site	Posted at 4:18 pm (03 Feb 2009)

CBC.ca has moved from the second floor up to the ninth floor over the course of the past two weeks. Us, along with the finance department were the first “guinea pigs” for the office space redesign.

Because this is going to be our permanent home, we were literally given keys to the blueprint. After playing around with little chairs, tables, and desks on a floor plan the workers starting building our “dream office”. In 7 months or so, they were complete!

You can see a few select photos of our new space from my co-worker Julian Dunn on his flickr page. Additionally what our old space looked like is also available on flickr.

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	, CBC.ca web site, Under the Hood	Posted at 12:18 pm (22 Jan 2009)

Early Monday morning (01:00-05:00 ET Monday January 12, 2009) we will be taking the site off-line to perform some much needed maintenance on our storage device.

The CBC.ca website uses a lot of disk space. All of the media, news stories, podcasts, etc.. add up. We store all of this information on device produced by a company called BlueArc. All of the web and application servers “mount” the BlueArc to serve the website content. There is approx. 3 terabytes of data that is used for the website. 3 Terabytes is a lot of data, to put it in perspective:

1 Terabyte would be equal to 50,000 pages of printed material.
1 Terabyte of seconds would be 32,000 years.
850 Terabytes of storage is used for all of the pages in the Google search index
2,250,000,000 Terabytes of data in 1 gram of DNA

What will I see during the outage?
Because we need to take the BlueArc offline to perform the maintenance, all of the pages in CBC.ca will not be available. However, we are going to be providing an extremely limited site (what we’re referring internally as the “skinny site”). This site will be extremely light-weight and only offer the latest news.

A preview of the site during the maintenance.

All other content will be unavailable until the maintenance is complete.

If you have any specific questions on how the BlueArc works, or why we’re doing this maintenance, please feel free to post a comment.

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	CBC.ca web site, News & Journalism, Under the Hood	Posted at 3:42 pm (08 Jan 2009)