This is a copy and paste of an article on the internal employee portal from this afternoon. I’m copying it here because I thought it would be of interest the wider public:

November 4, 2010 – CBC Radio fans can now listen to CBC Radio One, Radio 2 and Radio 3 on iPad thanks to the latest update to the highly popular CBC Radio app. The new universal app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch is available now on the Apple App Store.

“It’s truly exciting to be able to offer the full slate of CBC Radio’s diverse program excellence in such accessible and innovative ways via the iPad. It feels like a whole new rich content experience,” said Denise Donlon, general manager, CBC Radio.

Listeners can listen live to any CBC Radio station across Canada or program favourite CBC Radio shows on-demand such as The Current with Anna Maria Tremonti, Q with Jian Ghomeshi, The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers, the new Day 6 with Brent Bambury, Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel, As it Happens with Carol Off and much more.

Enjoy live streams of CBC Radio 2 including Radio 2 Morning hosted by Bob Mackowycz, Tempo hosted by mezzo-soprano Julie Nesrallah and Drive with Rich Terfry. Plug into CBC Radio 2’s live streams of Canadian composers, Canadian songwriters, classical and jazz channels or catch CBC Radio 3 with all genres of new music including indie rock, hip hop and electronica.

The updated CBC Radio app brings iPad users the full range of CBC Radio content already available to those with iPhone or iPod touch. Users can also access the CBC Program Guide to find out what’s playing now or to plan their CBC Radio listening schedule.

As well, the updated app also offers audio sessions from CBC-TV favourites, letting listeners enjoy audio-only versions of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Mansbridge One on One and the CBC News At Issue panel.

CBC Radio content accessible through the CBC Radio app includes:

• CBC Radio One: A wide range of local, national and international news, current affairs, documentaries, arts and culture including 63 on-demand programs and 22 live streams.

• CBC Radio 2: The best Canadian music, commercial-free: classical, jazz, singer-songwriters, pop, R&B, world, soul and much more. Four on-demand programs and nine live streams.

• CBC Radio 3: A ‘Best Online Radio’ nominee at the Webby awards two years in a row, CBC Radio 3 is THE place to discover the best new Canadian indie acts. Five on-demand programs and one live stream, plus access to more than 100,000 tracks from more than 20,000 artists via the now embedded in-app CBC Radio 3 website.

The app also lets users run CBC Radio content as multi-tasking background audio while tending to other tasks on iPhone or iPod touch. For iPhone, the app also remembers episode playback positions if listening is interrupted by an incoming phone call.

The CBC Radio app is available for free from the Apple App Store on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, or at www.itunes.com/appstore.

More info:

CBC mobile services

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	CBC Mobile, CBC Radio 1, CBC Radio 2, CBC Radio 3, Platforms	Posted at 9:28 pm (04 Nov 2010)

CBC Radio 3′s top 30 chart program, the R3 30, is teaming up with Chartattack.

Chartattack compiles the Top 50 Canadian Campus Radio Chart, along with its genre-specific charts World/Folk, Metal/Punk, Jazz/Blues, Electronic and Hip-Hop. They’ve been doing this for 20 years. Under the deal Chartattack’s charts editor Chris Burland will participate in a segment called “CHARTattack Way Back Track” as part of The R3-30 three-hour broadcast.

Pedro Mendes, the producer on R3-30 had this to say:

The history of indie music has long been an integral part of The R3-30, says Mendes, “and Chris, with his intimate knowledge of almost 20 years of CHARTattack hits, will take our show to a new level of depth and relevance. Plus, he always brings pie. We love pie.”

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 8:13 pm (30 Sep 2010)

The Canadian Music Scene is getting nerdier.

This because of the launch last May of the Canadian Music Wiki a joint project between CBC Radio 3 and University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

According to the website’s mission statement, it is “dedicated to using collaborative and social media to enrich Canada’s music scene by creating a comprehensive guide to Canadian music.”

Launched on the 21st of May, the site was 9 months in the making.

Steve Pratt, the director of CBC Radio 3, and Alfred Hermida, an associate professor at the UBC school of journalism came up with the idea. They asked Amanda Ash, a graduate student at UBC, to join the project because it combined her interests in social media with her background in music journalism.

“This was their initial idea to put together something like this,” she said recently over the phone, “and I took that idea and ran with it.”

The site currently has 2,300 pages of original content. The goal is to keep that momentum going. They are also updating the site so it’s easier to contribute. “We want everyone to be able to add, from your grandmother to a 16-year old kid that’s a Justin Bieber fan,” Ash said. She said the first step it get a base of contributors and keep it growing.

According to Ash, Radio 3 is the perfect kind of environment to experiment with a project like the Canadian Music Wiki. “Radio 3 is kind of on the fringe, and we’re given a little more space to experiment,” she said.

Ash said that although there isn’t a lot of resources available for the project, she hopes the community will come together and sustain the site now that it’s up and running.

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 6:57 pm (05 Aug 2010)

Radio 3 recently hit a really big milestone. The 100,000th track was uploaded to the site.

“Having 100,000 Canadian songs uploaded to the site is a huge milestone for CBC Radio 3 and a testament to the depth and quality of the Canadian music community,” says Steve Pratt, director, CBC Radio 3 and digital music.

The 100,000th song was a track called Cold Cold Blues by InLimbo, a four-piece alt/indie band from Niagara Falls, Ontario.

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 6:54 pm (27 Jul 2010)

CBC Radio 3 launched a redesigned web site this morning. The revamp has been in the works for over a year, and it includes updates to the music player, the introduction of four new streams, a playlist editor and a bunch of social media tools.

In the video below, Steve Pratt, the director of Radio 3, provides a quick tour of some of the new features, focusing mostly on the new radio streams.

As Pratt says in the video above “there used to be just one web radio station, now there’s five.” In addition to the main Radio 3 stream, there’s also streams for pop, rock, hiphop and electronic music.

Additionally the new site includes many social media features, many of which are unique to Radio 3, like creating personal playlists, the ability to forward tracks to friends, and the ability to sign in and create user profiles on the site. Thankfully the site is also larger and exposes more of the blog posts and content, including concert calenders.

“The goal was to showcase more of what CBC Radio 3 has to offer than just our blog and the streaming radio service. We found with our old design, many people didn’t know that all the music played on CBC Radio 3 has been uploaded by musicians and that there are over 18,000 artists and over 80,000 songs on the website to browse through, discover, and share with others,” Pratt said on the site this morning.

Another feature of the new site is the thumbs up or thumbs down feature which allows users to rate the songs and according to Pratt “will let us improve the music programming on CBC Radio 3 by understanding which songs have stronger (or weaker) reaction from listeners.”

Overall the reaction to the new site is generally positive, although some users have reported bugs on a few features while others are having problems with the streams.

A guide to the new Radio 3 site is available here, there are also a bunch of tutorial videos on YouTube here. If you spot a bug or something wacky with the site you can send it to the developers here.

What do you think of the new site?

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 12:45 pm (06 Oct 2009)

Steve Pratt, the boss at CBC Radio 3 says that Radio 3 isn’t really a radio station, “It’s more like we try to be experts and help people discover new Canadian music,” he said recently in the free daily Metro.

Pratt says that Radio 3 is more like an ecosystem – an organic community. “A lot of the tools on the website are designed to help people discover and get to know artists and then be able to share stuff they like with their own social networks,” he said.

There is no doubt that Pratt believes in strongly in online distribution, but only to an extent. For instance, he doesn’t believe the web should be a dumping ground for content.

He said on his blog in May, regurgitating TV or radio content online is a bad strategy because it doesn’t necessarily address what the audience wants. “It is this ease of ‘copying and pasting’ content on the web that often leads to a lack of thinking about serving the unique needs of the audience online,” Pratt wrote.

All of this puts Pratt in an interesting position. As the director of CBC Radio 3, he wants to avoid being saddled with corporate-wide solutions that don’t met his needs and he wants to try to experiment as much as possible. This sometimes puts Radio 3 at odds with CBC corporate mandates. But as Pratt says “a one-size fits all solution for the creation and distribution of digital content isn’t sufficient and can possibly hamper your success and growth.”

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 6:34 pm (14 Jul 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 3 now has a Twitter feed at http://www.twitter.com/cbcradio3, which tweets new podcast releases, network news, and more.

(If the above sentence makes no sense to you, read on.)

It’s kind of hard to explain Twitter to people who haven’t heard of it, so I’ll borrow from the Wikipedia text:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters long.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default).

Twitter is now being adopted by companies and media organizations like CBC News as a way of sending updates to people who follow them. It’s a simple of effective way of announcing new blog posting, news reports just in, and so on.

This blog itself has a Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/thecbc. Click “Follow” to receive a Tweet every time this blog has a new story.

Do you know of any other CBC- or media-related Twitter feeds? Let me know in the comments and I’ll update this post them them.

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 1:18 pm (01 Aug 2008)

Canada’s best record store, according to CBC Radio 3, is Meow Records in Prince George, B.C.

Thus, Meow and CBC Radio 3 will host a two-hour concert this Friday to be broadcast live on the network on May 23 between 4 and 6 pm.

This was no simple poll; this was a playoff-style series of polls that took two months to decide the victor in the war of the vinyl. Chad VanGaalen, a rising star in the indie scene right now, was one of the supporters of Meow’s bid, and will be performing at the store concert on Friday.

Meow will be holding events all day Friday, so if you’re in the area, get on down there and bring your best sense of funk.

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 9:31 am (20 May 2008)

Web videos have tons of potential practical applications. Video blogs are becoming increasingly popular due to the ease of shooting and production. This recent video blog by Al Thompkins, as reposted by Dan Misener on his blog, shows how to make short videos on the cheap using a “Flip” camera, some simple editing software, and your own ingenuity. It isn’t as hard as you would think.

The Flip camera is a video camera with a “flip-out” USB port that allows you to plug it directly into your computer without a cable. It is available inexpensively, at a price point of around $200 as opposed to the expected $1200 for a digital video camera in the past.

This brings the realm of the video blog into everyone’s reach. Mr. Thompkins runs through the technology and software needed to work with a Mac; it is easily adaptable to a PC simply by just changing the software package to something like Podesk which is tailor-made to produce video blogs and video podcasts.

CBC shows have been taking advantage of this video format and have been posting their own short web videos; check out the following links to get the feel.

Spark – How To Make A Radio Show
The host of “Spark” and co-staff produced this how-to video.
http://www.danmisener.com/archives/334

R3TV (Radio 3 TV)
http://blip.tv/file/258335/
This contains some fun stuff, a music video, and interesting commentary in the manner of an internet video rather than a sleekly produced TV Show.

ZeD:
http://zed.cbc.ca/go?c=ZedCandidHomepage
While cancelled, the videos on this page try to keep the feel of an amateur internet video and give you the general idea of what is possible.

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	CBC Radio 3, How Shows Work, Other Internet, Podcasting, Production Gear	Posted at 1:45 pm (03 May 2008)

There’s a poll on over at CBC Radio 3 that gives you a chance to donate your input on the future of the format of the online radio station. Make sure you sign in before completing the poll, or you’ll have to start all over. Shout out to publicbroadcasting.ca for the heads up.

Go here for opinionated goodness:
http://radio3.cbc.ca/polls/?pollId=15

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 9:09 pm (01 May 2008)

This is the final week of voting for the Webbys People’s Choice and CBC Radio 3 needs your help.

For public broadcasters like CBC Radio 3, we are not judged by how much revenue we take in (which is none), but by how relevant we are to our community of listeners. And an award like the Webbys People’s Voice is a great way to document community support.

If you like what Radio 3 is doing, and you want to help us champion independent Canadian musicians in this country and on the international stage, than please take the time to vote. (Once you’ve confirmed your registration, you’ll find R3 under Website / Media / Radio.)

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	Awards, CBC Radio 3	Posted at 2:52 pm (28 Apr 2008)

CBC Radio 3 has been nominated for a prestigious Webby Award, in the radio category.  The nomination, which was unveiled earlier today by The Webby Film & Video Awards, puts CBC Radio 3 in the company of BBC Radio 1, iCat fm, NPR and Virgin Radio.

As one of five nominees from around the world in this category, Radio 3 and the team behind it are eligible for the Internet industry’s two most sought-after awards: The Webby Award and The Webby People’s Voice Award. This is the second year in a row that Radio 3 has been nominated.

CBC overall was also named an “official honoree” for CBC Podcasts—an honour granted to fewer than 15% of entrants and one that signifies an outstanding caliber of work.

Unlike other awards shows, where only judges choose the winners, The Webby Awards also give the global Web community an opportunity to decide who will take home a Webby. Starting today, and running through to May 1, the public can cast their votes in The Webby’s People Voice Awards.  Award winners will be announced May 6, and honoured at a star-studded ceremony ceremony for the 12th Annual Webby Awards in New York City on June 9.

Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet,” The Webby Film and Video Awards are the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. This year, the Awards received a record 9,500 entries from across the U.S. and over 60 countries worldwide.

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	Awards, CBC Radio 3	Posted at 2:45 pm (09 Apr 2008)

As some listeners know, some CBC Radio podcasts have sponsorship messages at the start of the content. I’ve received a lot of questions about why that’s happening, and asked Steve Pratt, head of CBC Radio’s digital initiatives, to explain the rationale.

Do we really need to have sponsorship messages in CBC podcasts? Isn’t CBC Radio supposed to be non-commercial?

CBC Radio is only funded for terrestrial (AM & FM) broadcasting. All the money to make our podcasting a reality is cobbled together at the expense of our ‘traditional’ radio programming.

There is a significant amount of effort going into the creation of the podcasts.  CBC Radio produces over 40 separate podcasts a week, almost all of which need to be edited to fit a podcast format, or to remove material that we do not have the right to put in a podcast.  We also produce several original ‘podcast-only’ programs that are not broadcast on terrestrial radio.

In all cases, this production takes time and money that we don’t have and can’t sustain. (As you know if you check out iTunes, our podcasts are extremely popular, and every download consumes bandwidth, too.)

So CBC Radio has made the choice that several other public broadcasters have made – to include sponsorship messages to help pay for these increasing costs.

So why have podcasts at all?

We feel it’s vitally important for the future of CBC Radio that we provide our programming as podcasts.  More and more audiences are choosing to consume content on platforms other than a traditional broadcast, and as a public broadcaster, we need to do what we can to make our content available on these platforms or risk losing  relevance and value to our audiences.

But I thought the CBC gets new money from Parliament every year?

CBC has not had a substantive funding increase in some time, and if we waited to be given money to do new things, we’d very quickly fall behind the needs of our audiences.  We would not be in a position to consider alternative sources of funding should our funding increase to reflect the new realities of podcasting and other multiple platforms. I sincerely hope that in the future our funding will reflect these new realities.

In the meantime, though, I think it’s far more important that we find ways to distribute our content where it matters to our audience instead of staying out of the game entirely because we can’t afford it.

We conducted a survey a couple years ago in order to gauge interest in podcasts and it provided some strong guidance as to how we should proceed with respect to sponsorship. An overwhelming percent said they wanted CBC podcasts and that they wanted them to be a free service from their public broadcaster. They told us very clearly that they did not want to pay for podcasting themselves. We have to respect that.

Do the sponsors have any control over the content?

The sponsors have no say, and will never have any say, in the content we produce.  That has not happened at the CBC in television, it does not happen on the website, and it will not happen in radio.

As always, please weigh in with what you think. Faced with limited options (no podcasts, charging listeners for podcasts, or permitting sponsorships), did we make the right call?

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	CBC Radio 1, CBC Radio 2, CBC Radio 3, Podcasting	Posted at 12:42 pm (14 Nov 2007)