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)

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)

CBC television’s audience share is up 30 per cent since hitting a low point in 2002, Kirstine Layfield said in a note to staff to staff on Tuesday.

CBC TV’s current regular season prime time audience share now stands at 8.9 per cent - up from 6.7 per cent in the 2002/2003 season.

“We have never seen a share gain of this magnitude in history (going back to 1976),” Layfield wrote.

The audience share number is for weeks 5 to 17 of prime time audiences.

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	CBC Television	Posted at 7:27 pm (06 Jan 2009)

This morning, the National Post published part of a response from the CBC, challenging the assertions of one of its scribes. Lorne Gunter wrote on Monday that the CBC shouldn’t exist, our ratings are going down, and that Richard Stursberg eats babies (metaphorically speaking).

The CBC, as you might expect, responded. But take a look (highlighted) at what the National Post edited out of the CBC’s letter:

Lorne Gunter appears to exist in an intriguing alternative universe; let’s call it Gunter Land and consider how it differs from the world the rest of us inhabit. In the real world, CBC president Hubert T. Lacroix offered his endorsement of recommendations from a recent Heritage Committee report. His comments (available to the real world for review at http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/ speeches/20080522.shtml) actually focused on the need for improved governance and accountability for the CBC/ Radio-Canada through a multi-year memorandum of understanding on its mandate. In fact, it was the Heritage Committee that recommended stable and predictable funding.

While in Gunter Land the CBC need not exist, Canadians would lose a distinctly Canadian prime-time alternative to the wealth of U. S. programming currently available on other Canadian networks. And in stark contrast to Gunter Land, CBC audiences are growing, not shrinking; our radio audiences are at historic highs and our television market share of 7.8% is at its highest level since 2001.

And as noted in most newspapers yesterday (excluding the Post), we actually beat Global in prime time this past season for the first time since 1995. In GunterLand, CBC News “insults millions of Canadians” with its news coverage. In the real world, CBC News is considered one of the most respected and credible organizations in broadcast journalism.  This is demonstrated through survey data and a host of domestic and international awards. We closely track the audience response to our programming and occasionally there are objections. But where are these “millions of Canadians”? Citizens of GunterLand, apparently.

Finally, in the real universe, CBC operates with one of the lowest public subsidies in the industrialized world. It is a fraction of that provided to the BBC, which provides service in only one language and a single time zone. In fact, Canadians get real world value from the CBC every day, despite the peculiar view from Gunter Land

This editing must be some kind of oversight. I mean, I know that the National Post is owned by the same company that owns Global Television. But they wouldn’t edit that just because they’d be embarrassed that they’re losing ratings to us? Naw… couldn’t be.

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	CBC Television, The Media Landscape	Posted at 10:24 am (28 May 2008)

Marketplace has been upset from its 7:30pm Wednesday time slot by the syndicated game show Jeopardy. It will not return to the programming roster until January of 2009, when it is predicted to take over the Friday evening time slot left vacant by the departing Royal Canadian Air Farce.

Marketplace is the only adult show on CBC to not run ads, a commitment the show has kept since it started 36 seasons ago. This is in keeping with the shows spotlight on consumer affairs. The time slot bump was a move to simulcast Jeopardy at the same time as its US media counterparts broadcast the show.

Maybe the CBC is just pining for the old days when Alex Trebek belonged to us…

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	CBC Television	Posted at 11:08 am (26 May 2008)

CBC Television has announced its new summer lineup. Highlights include:

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?
Broadcast Premiere: Sunday, June 15th, 8:00pm
This reality show takes 48 contestants and promises to shape one of them into the new star of a live stage version of the movie “The Sound Of Music”. I’m  guessing that Canadian reality TV starlets will be a bit more restrained than their compatriots on “Girlicious”, but who knows? Catfights, dancing, and rousing renditions of “My Favourite Things” - does it get any better than this? (That was rhetorical, folks.)

Othello
One-Time Broadcast: Sunday, June 15th, 9:00pm
This 2 hour adaptation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece stars Carlo Rota (Little Mosque on the Prairie) as the tortured moor and Christine Horne (The Stone Angel) as his wife, Desdemona.

Test The Nation: Sports
One-Time Broadcast: Sunday, May 25th, 8:00pm
Ron MacLean (Hockey Night in Canada) joins host Wendy Mesley for a trivia brawl involving sports fans, athletes, and, er, NHL mascots.

Everest
Broadcast Premiere: Sunday, Aug 31, 8:00pm
This four hour miniseries is a dramatization of the 1982 adventure of the first Canadians to ever climb Mount Everest, Laurie Skreslet and Pat Morrow. Jason Priestley (Don’t Cry Now, 90210), William Shatner (Star Trek, Boston Legal) and Leslie Hope (24) headline an incredible ensemble cast.

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	CBC Television, Programming	Posted at 12:06 pm (22 May 2008)

Their loss, our gain…

The Bureau of Broadcast Measurement’s spring ratings are out - and ratings are up for the Montreal newscast by 28%; 22% of those are new viewers.

This article speculates that some of those viewers may have jumped ship with Frank Cavallaro, an award-winning Weather Specialist who just joined the CBC earlier this year when the CTV news team did not renew his contract. Cavallero was voted the World’s Top Weather Presenter at the International Weather Festival held in Paris in 2002, and has been forecasting since the late 1980’s.

Incidentally, if you’ve always wanted to be a weather forecaster on the CBC and live in Calgary, that very job just got posted on the CBC jobs site this morning.

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	CBC News at Six, CBC Television, Montreal	Posted at 11:56 am (15 May 2008)

The former captain of Canada’s soccer team, Jason DeVos, will be joining CBC Television as a soccer analyst, beginning in a couple of weeks when Toronto FC plays Columbus.

DeVos retired from international soccer in 2004, and since has been playing professionally with Ipswich in the English Championship League.

DeVos is moving back to London, ON. He is 34.

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	CBC Television, Personalities	Posted at 11:31 am (08 May 2008)

Last week, Peter Mansbridge celebrated being in the main chair at CBC Television News for twenty years. To celebrate this anniversary, the producers snuck in a video of Mansbridge’s first broadcast twenty years ago in the following broadcast.

Video will pause for a bit at start. Surprise happens after Coyne’s comments.

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	Archives/Vintage Media, CBC Newsworld, CBC Television, News & Journalism, Personalities	Posted at 11:10 am (05 May 2008)

YouTube has activated mobile access for its partners, so CBC Television’s YouTube clips are now available to be viewed on your mobile phone at m.youtube.com/cbc [punch that URL into your cell phone].

The site even checks with you to confirm that streaming video ain’t cheap in Canada (hmph) so be sure you want to stream.

So far, it’s confirmed to work on Rogers, Fido, not so much on Bell…

Any other reports?

Hat tip to Danny.

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	CBC Mobile, CBC Television	Posted at 1:11 am (28 Apr 2008)

Citing the success of The Border, the highest ratings ever for Rick Mercer Report, and strong showings from several new series, CBC Television increased its prime-time share (7 p.m. to 11 p.m.) to 7.8 for weeks six through 32 (October 1, 2007 to April 6, 2008), surpassing Global Television for the first time since 1995.

According to BBM/MNR (BBM Nielsen Media Research), Global posted a 7.4 share for the same period for Adults 2+.

“We’re thrilled Canadians are enjoying our programs in such large numbers. We’ve built a schedule with new shows and returning favourites, and we’ve really hit our stride,” said Kirstine Layfield, executive director of network programming.

However, as someone noted in the comments post of this blog, the U.S. Writers’ Strike may have temporarily reduced Global’s numbers.

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	CBC Television	Posted at 12:43 pm (22 Apr 2008)

CBC Television is shuffling two of its new anchor dramas, in an attempt to boost sagging ratings.

Steamy hockey soap-opera MVP will move to Tuesday nights, bumping jPod to Fridays beginning this week.

Media In Canada reports:

Both one-hours struggled to maintain audiences in the key 25-54 demographic. Produced in Vancouver, jPod started off with 293,000 in the Tuesday 9 pm time slot, but by the third week had dropped to 100,000. The story is much the same for MVP, about the office antics of hockey pros and their wives and girlfriends, which garnered 208,000 viewers in the demo with its debut, but was down to 51,000 last week.

Like drama series Intelligence, the shows are garnering positive reviews from critics; the reviews don’t seem to translate into viewers in the numbers CBC had hoped for. (CBC has yet to make a decision on whether it will renew Intelligence for a third season. The show’s producer, Chris Haddock, says CBC is dragging its feet on a decision and failed to promote the previous two seasons to his satisfaction.)

On Tuesday nights, MVP will now compete against ratings powerhouse American Idol on CTV and House on Global (though the latter has been airing re-runs for about two months, owing to the American writers’ strike).

THE GOOD NEWS?

It’s not all bad news at CBC Television. The sitcom Sophie was recently sold to ABC Family, and rumours say The Border will be sold to CBS or ABC soon. Reality series The Week the Women Went earned nearly 900,000 viewers last week.

An a memo to staff this morning titled “Champagne anyone?” CBC’s head of English services Richard Stursberg said CBC Television has “had an excellent season so far, including the highest launch week prime-time share (8.3%) in six years. And our fall regular season prime-time share is 7.6%, a 0.7 percentage point increase over 06/07.”

Our new research, tracking public opinion and perceptions about CBC-TV, suggests we’re making significant gains across the board. We measure people’s attitudes towards us; how people feel about the programs we broadcast. We think it’s important to know not only how many people are watching and what they watch, but how they feel about us. And when it comes to the values we at the CBC really care about, it turns out we leave the competition in the dust. Specifically, CBC continues to lead the other two conventional broadcasters on measures like “Distinctively Canadian” and “High Quality Programming.”

The memo did not mention MVP, jPod, or any information on CBC Radio numbers.

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	CBC Television, MVP, jPod	Posted at 11:56 am (04 Feb 2008)

In case you missed it, yesterday CBC-TV tried something new, and held its first “winter preview” of upcoming prime-time programs.

Previewed programs include immigration drama The Border, sitcom Sophie, Douglas Coupland’s jPod, lifestyle series The Steven & Chris Show, reality program The Week the Women Went, and the much-anticipated MVP – “a sexy look at a fictional NHL team of hunky players and the women who love them.”

Special programming includes The Englishman’s Boy, Project X, The Confidential Series, plus the returns of H2O, Test the Nation and Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.

(Aside: I kept stumbling upon tidbits about the tapings of these shows back in July, when I last did this blog - including jPod, The Border and The Week the Women Went - so I’m looking forward to seeing them on air.)

Today’s Globe sees the lineup as an effort to attract “a younger, more female audience.” And the media has been quick to draw a correlation between CBC’s push and the ongoing American screenwriters strike. CBC executives admit there’s certainly an opening.

“All I see is opportunity - we have a shot,” head of network programming Kirstine Layfield told the Canadian Press. “People are going to be looking for something to watch, and I always find when people watch Canadian television, they are pleasantly surprised. It’s hard, it’s really hard, to make a mark and this is really going to help us.”

A day earlier, Layfield reported interest from U.S. networks in CBC programs . She confirmed that The Border was one of them. Westwind Production’s Mary Darling says Little Mosque on the Prairie is another.

But Writers Guild of Canada president Rebecca Schechter, who also had a hand in Little Mosque, said optimists like Darling are “dreaming in Technicolor.”

“It’s a weird pipe dream,” she said. “American giant conglomerates, they’ve not come across the border to Canada. They have consistently showed no interest in putting Canadian programming on American network television.”

The WGC plans to participate in an international display of solidarity on Nov. 28.

If you are really pining for American content, you’ll be able to get that on CBC too. According to CP, “CBC also said Tuesday it has acquired the rights to Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune from CBS Paramount International. Both shows will begin airing in September 2008.”

As for the Canadian stuff – well, the launch, and its fortuitous timing, managed to create a certain level of optimism. Prolific television blogger Denis McGrath, also a writer on The Border, had this to say of the event:

The impression I walked away with? When Layfield and the new regime started at CBC they took a lot of heat for saying they wanted to redefine and remake what the broadcaster was, and the kind of programming it did. This looks like a pretty vibrant schedule — it definitely has energy and a potential for big pop. I hope the stuff all works. It would be nice for CBC to get a win.

And if the WGA strike is still on, Canadians might actually get a chance to fairly sample their homegrown wares. It’s the best slate I’ve seen from CBC in a while.

What do you think of the winter lineup? Does the U.S. strike present an opportunity for CBC?

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	CBC Television, Little Mosque on the Prairie, MVP, Marketing/Promotion, The Media Landscape	Posted at 4:36 pm (21 Nov 2007)

On this date only a year ago…

CBC Television went to a 24-hour schedule. It was one of the last major English-language broadcasters to do so.

And yesterday happened to mark the 14th anniversary of Peter Mansbridge reporting about a new kind of computer network — a “revolution” called “Internet.”

The clip has become somewhat famous online, mostly because back then, people didn’t put the word “The” in front of “Internet.” It just sounds so, I don’t know, hokey now. It’s worth watching on the CBC Archives site if you have a moment.

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	CBC Television, Programming	Posted at 8:48 am (09 Oct 2007)

I’m always amazed at the volume of audience feedback we get. One of the best perks of working here is to follow the audience reaction reports which are generated weekly for senior managers (and anyone else who wants to follow them).

The comments aren’t always kind (I personally had more than a dozen complaints one week when I mispronouced kilometer — it’s KILL-o-meter, not kil-AH-meter) but they’re always insightful and a good gauge on how we’re doing.

These are my favourite from the latest report:

• “PLEASE STOP showing that disgusting spider or I will stop watching your network. It is unfair because there is no warning and therefore can’t be avoided.”
• “The Whiskas commercial is disgusting. There’s sexual innuendo. And it’s on a million times a day.”
• “My family said the tornado warning was lifted by 6:30 but you repeated it at 7:00. Should we still be worried?”
• “Gill Deacon wears too many jackets.”
• “Five minutes into your one-hour flagship newscast we are given a story about the “Tour de Farce” (quoting your newsreader). Why not just tell us that there is no news today instead of making a pathetic attempt at humour or cleverness.”
• “When did CBC announcers/reporters start using American pronunciation? When did Missile (as in MISS AISLE) becoming missile (rhymes with thistle)?”

Full audience relations reports: Television | Radio | cbc.ca (links available only within CBC internal network)

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	CBC Radio 1, CBC Radio 2, CBC Television, CBC.ca web site	Posted at 9:04 pm (06 Sep 2007)