A little infopr0n of the CBC’s Olympic coverage, for those of you who like numbers:

• >90% satisfaction level with CBC programming, among Canadians who watched the Games (CP/Harris Decima)
• 1.29 million viewers: overall average CBC Television audience
• 933,000 viewers: Opening Ceremony
• 8.20 million viewers: Closing Ceremony
• Largest audience: 2.6 million (for Simon Whitfield’s race on Aug. 18)
• 46 million web pages viewed under CBCsports.ca/olympics
  
• >2 million web pages per day viewed
• 3.2 million: live streams served
  
• 1.7 million: on-demand streams served
  

Over to you, CTV. As they say fondly in some regions of the country, “Do your worst, m’ boys.”

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	Olympic Games	Posted at 10:49 am (27 Aug 2008)

Sadly this is the last Olympics that CBC will be covering for a while. That said, this is also the most well covered Olympics in CBC history. Partly thanks to the Internet and cbc.ca.

Don’t Feed The Animals
cbc.ca/olympics provides you with up to 12 online “channels” where you can watch Olympic events live. This is possible thanks to the folks in Television (specifically Web Presentation group), encoding software by Digital Rapids called StreamZ, and Akamai.

The Olympic feeds are back hauled by Television to Toronto where they are encoded by the Digital Rapids boxes. They are encoded in Windows Media v8 at 500kbps. This stream is then sent to Akamai for distribution.

In most cases the video you see are raw feeds from the venues. This means that there is no commentary. The only audio you here is ambient sounds from the event.

A lot of people like these feeds as they provide coverage for their sport even if it is not available on television.

Canada Only, Please
Due to licensing restrictions by the IOC, only Canadians are able to view Olympic coverage provided by the CBC. As such, we’ve had to use technology from Akamai to ensure that we follow the rules.

The Akamai method of “geofencing” (as we call it) is more sophisticated than what I described earlier. Multiple methods are used, some of them are:

• Your IP Address. Using a database of known IP blocks and locations.
• Which Akamai DNS server you use. When you look up a host name (like www.cbc.ca) you hit a specific Akamai DNS server. Akamai knows which DNS server is in which country and uses that information to figure out what country you’re in.
  BGP Metrics. In a nutshell, Akamai looks at what other servers/routers you go through to get to the stream. If those are in the country Akamai thinks you’re in, then the confidence level goes up.
• Timezones. Using a piece of javascript on the client side. We figure out what timezone your clock is set to. If it matches with one of the timezones in the country Akamai thinks you’re in, confidence level goes up.
• We have people who watch you.

The methods listed above, plus a bunch of others combine to give a Country accuracy level of 99%.

Trends
Because of the twelve hour difference (in the Eastern Time Zone) quite a few of the events happen late at night and early the next morning.

The above graph shows the number of people watching the streams over the past seven days. The majority of the watching happens between 8pm and 12am EDT, and 6am and 12pm EDT.

Some days are more popular than others (like August 14, versus August 16). The little red arrow you see on August 19, at around 12pm EDT is when the most users were watching the streams ever.

I suspect that the closing ceremonies will generate the most streaming traffic during the Olympics.

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	CBC.ca web site, Specials, Under the Hood	Posted at 2:11 pm (20 Aug 2008)

CBC’s president Hubert Lacroix appeared before a Parliamentary committee yesterday, again defending the Corporation’s decision to air a one-hour special of the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame gala that focused on Oscar Peterson and Paul Anka.

The CBC faced charges of racism after performances by Claude Dubois, a fellow 2008 Hall of Fame inductee, and other francophone artists were excluded from the television broadcast in March.

“Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees,” Lacroix said, referring to the many CBC programs that address the country’s linguistic duality and the mandate of the gala broadcast. He also pointed out that CBC Radio 2 aired the show in its entirety, and that Radio-Canada, the francophone counterpart of CBC, did not broadcast the gala.

“We recognize that we could have done a better job of reflecting the diversity of the performances in our television broadcast of the gala,” he said. “And while programming decisions are ours to make, these events have raised our level of awareness on these issues and I can tell you we will do a better job with these kinds of broadcasts in the future.”

This is the second time in as many months that the public broadcaster has appeared before the official languages committee to answer questions about the Songwriters Hall of Fame gala broadcast. Last month, committee members grilled Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president of English services, over the decision to air only English-language performances. The decision outraged Francophone artists, prompting the committee to call for CBC/Radio-Canada’s appearance.

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	Specials	Posted at 9:55 am (28 May 2008)

CBC Radio 2 and Espace musique is working on a really cool sounding broadcast celebrating the life of Glenn Gould. It’s a 10-day event from September 25 through to October 4. (The dates are significant; September 25 would have marked Gould’s 75th birthday, while October 4 marks the 25th anniversary of his death.)

But I think the really cool part of the project will be a live broadcast from six different cities — each city hosting its own pianist doing a variation of Gould’s music.

While the concert is going on, photos sent in by Canadians will be mixed live by a visual DJ. You can send in your photos here.

I was in Montreal earlier this week and I chatted with Hugues Sweeney, one of the CBC/Radio-Canada people working on the project. (In the video, I misspelled Hugues’ first name. Agh.)

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	CBC Radio 2, Canada Live, Radio-Canada, Specials	Posted at 7:24 am (14 Sep 2007)

Who needs audition calls in malls when you’ve got YouTube?

CBC Television is turning to the popular video sharing site, owned by Google, to recruit young candidates for the upcoming season of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.

In fact, it’s the only way people can apply.

Last year’s show attracted close to a million viewers and the four finalists shared the stage with former Canadian prime ministers.

Random trivia: The show is based on a popular nationwide competition originated in 1995 by Frank Stronach, father of Liberal MP Belinda Stronach.

The YouTube site is at http://youtube.com/nextprimeminister

What do you think? Is using YouTube for audition submissions a good way to experiment with social media? Or does it discourage participation from those without a computer?

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	Specials	Posted at 12:32 pm (10 Sep 2007)

Proponents of various causes on the CBC Wish List project on Facebook are making a last push (surge?) to the finish line, and at least one group of Wishers have built an application to help increase the numbers.

People supporting liberal causes have developed this viral Facebook application which encourages people to vote for like-minded wishes and to add the app to their profile. Similarly, there is a group now called “Last minute push” which says “Let’s pull together progressives across Canada and make sure the anti-choicers don’t win.”

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	Specials	Posted at 3:40 pm (29 Jun 2007)

The Globe and Mail this morning reports:

Last summer’s dust-up over Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, in which CBC Television withdrew the $7.9-million drama under pressure from the descendants of the NDP leader’s old political foes, has reached a sunny resolution for the miniseries’ embattled writers and producers.

At the Cannes MIPTV broadcast marketplace on the French Riviera earlier this spring, Giant’s producer, Kevin De Walt of Mind’s Eye Entertainment, revealed that a deal had been struck with Hallmark International to air the two-part drama on Hallmark specialty channels in 156 territories, from Scandinavia to the Middle East.

The deal means that Prairie Giant can be screened again, something that looked unlikely after CBC cancelled a scheduled rebroadcast and suspended sales of Prairie Giant DVDs, citing uneasiness over the way it had been dramatized.

In 2005, when CBC invested $1.2-million in the biographical drama, and the Saskatchewan NDP government put in $600,000, the Opposition Saskatchewan Party complained that the project was politically partisan. The Opposition renewed the attack after Giant was broadcast in March, 2006, and seen by more than 800,000 viewers, in part because Tommy Douglas’s old adversary, Liberal premier Jimmy Gardiner, was depicted as a reactionary xenophobe with a drink in his hand.

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	Media Coverage, Specials	Posted at 4:12 am (21 Jun 2007)

In case you missed it, the Seven Wonders of Canada, selected by a three-person jury assembled by the CBC, are:

• The canoe
• The igloo
• Niagara Falls
• Old Quebec City
• The Prairie skies
• The Rockies
• Halifax’s Pier 21

[Ed. note: What?! Didn't they get my William Shatner nomination?!]

CBC received more than 25,000 nominations for the contest, and more than one million votes from viewers and listeners were recorded. One newspaper report profiled a bit about how the selection process worked:

One of the most poignant moments occurred when [Roy] MacGregor offered to give up his personal favourite — the canoe — which judges, by this point, referred to almost personally, as “canoe.”

“The canoe was number one all the way for me,” MacGregor said.

But when push came to shove, and one more wonder had to go, MacGregor — who grew up in the Algonquin Park area — offered the canoe.

“The canoe doesn’t really belong anywhere except in our minds,” he said.

But in a moment of wonder, perhaps inspired by the contest itself, the judges realized that the canoe is “by rights naturally as aboriginal as you can get,” in MacGregor’s words.

So, they gently removed the Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands), confident that the aboriginal heritage was intact.

I’m disappointed by the list. It seems to be confused — is this a list of actual locations, like the original Seven Wonders of the World are — or is this a list of things that represent Canadiana.

Instead, it’s a mish-mash of the two. If they had been a list of places I could have visited (as a few were), I’d have tried to get out to all of them. But how can I visit “the canoe” or “the igloo”? I’m not saying the CBC has an obligation to help tourist companies build tour packages, but would it have hurt?

For the record, the “winners” were those selected by the judges. The most popular selections, via online voting, included Nahanni National Park, Cabot Trail, Bay of Fundy, and the Sleeping Giant.

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	Specials	Posted at 12:29 pm (08 Jun 2007)

For the month of May, the CBC’s Anu Sahota will be posting CBC archives from Television and Radio to the CBC Asian Heritage month website. The aim is to complement Asian Heritage Month events across the country and to present rarely seen interviews and news items which reveal how Asian-Canadians have been spoken about and spoken to. She is especially interested in stories of folks who come from an Asian ancestry but who don’t necessarily feel a connection to cultural traditions. (An example of this is the artist Takao Tanabe, who Anu wrote about last week.)

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	Asides, CBC.ca web site, Specials	Posted at 5:32 pm (11 May 2007)

I have to say I’m pretty excited about this. Not only because my old todradio.com producer Anne Penman is behind it, but because it’s an awesome series.

CBC Radio One is bringing This I Believe, the popular National Public Radio program, based on the 1950s series hosted by Edward R. Murrow, to Canadians.

Starting Monday, May 14, the 12-week series, hosted by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, will feature short radio essays written and recorded by Canadians from all walks of life. Airing weekdays, after the 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. newscasts (except Monday’s 8 p.m. newscast just to be, you know, difficult), each essay explores the personal beliefs, perspectives and values that guide individuals.

Now wait, I hear you saying “Oh great, some namby-pamby navel-gazing exploration into values.” You really do have hear some of these to understand it. For instance, take magician Penn Jillette’s NPR essay on the show:

“I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again…

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

You can read his full essay called There Is No God too. It’s worth a read no matter what you believe.

You can submit your own personal essay at www.cbc.ca/thisibelieve

Selected contributors will be invited to record their essay for national broadcast during the 12-week series. These selections will air alongside essays by such prominent Canadians as Olympic gold medalist Clara Hughes, Canada’s first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Beverley McLachlin, Belinda Stronach, Auditor General Sheila Fraser, culinary king Susur Lee, former Iraq hostage James Loney, Inuit leader and Nobel prize nominee Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Chief Astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency Julie Payette, Kim Phuc, the haunting figure captured in the famous Vietnam War photograph, crime novelist William Deverell, and performer Rich Terfry (aka Buck 65).

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	Specials	Posted at 6:13 pm (10 May 2007)

Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle has some harsh words for the CBC’s Seven Wonders of Canada contest. In it, Canadians nominate their favourite place:

Maybe it has a natural beauty. Perhaps it’s because of the wildlife. It could be the people who live there…. The list of potential Canadian wonders is wide open. You can pick an awesome natural wonder, a beautiful building, that quirky little park at the end of your street, a rock shaped like your favourite prime minister, or even a regular weather phenomenon. Any physical feature in Canada could be a possibility. All we ask is that other Canadians be able to see it somehow.

(Personally, my vote is going to the lake beside the Jasper Park Lodge and the view from Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain.)

Anyway, back to Doyle, who says:

The Seven Wonders of Canada competition is an insult and its existence stands as an indictment of CBC’s current mania for brainless, smiley-face content. It’s delusional and an avoidance of straightforward confrontation of the issues that face us.

Wow. What do you think? Should CBC stick only to hard news, or should we balance programming with lighter stuff like Seven Wonders? 

(And let’s try to stay on topic, folks… I won’t be approving comments that don’t add to the discussion of this program or programs like it.)

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	Specials	Posted at 12:13 pm (07 May 2007)

The next Test the Nation special will be called Test the Nation: Watch Your Language and will challenge participants and viewers to spot common mistakes in spelling and grammar.

Sweet.

Bring it on.

(Er, bring it forthwith.)

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	Test The Nation	Posted at 2:22 pm (27 Mar 2007)

The Danish Poet, the 2007 Academy Award-winning animated short film co-produced by The National Film Board of Canada will debut on CBC this Sunday, March 4 at midnight. (Technically speaking, on Monday.)

Montreal-based Torill Kove’s The Danish Poet is narrated by multi-award winning Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and follows Kasper, a poet whose creative well has run dry, on a holiday to Norway to meet a famous writer. As his quest for inspiration unfolds, it appears that a spell of bad weather, an angry dog, slippery barn planks, a careless postman, hungry goats and other seemingly unrelated factors might play important roles in the big scheme of things after all.

It’ll air on Canadian Reflections, the the longest running showcase of independent short films, highlighting the first documentaries, dramas and animated films from up-and-coming Canadian directors, producers and writers.

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	Specials	Posted at 5:18 pm (27 Feb 2007)

The folks behind the upcoming CBC game show Test the Nation have put a sample quiz online for you to test your own brain. It’s only 10 questions. Amazingly, I made it onto the high-score list (which tells me either hardly anyone’s played it so far, or my fellow citizens are dolts).

Anyway, they’ve got a bunch of teams grouped by occupation (surgeons, mayors, fitness instructors, etc.) and on March 18, a live two-hour special will have viewers at home participating in a real-time interactive IQ test over the Internet.

Incidentally, theyre looking for teams for their second show, so if you fit in any of these categories:

• High School English Teachers
• Romance novelists
• Ad writers
• Fraternities and Sororities

…and you’re over 16, email them at ttn@cbc.ca, providing your name, which team you’d like to apply for, why you think you’d be good on the show, and a contact daytime phone number.

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	Specials	Posted at 1:28 pm (19 Feb 2007)

Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies, Blue Rodeo front man Jim Cuddy and novelist Donna Morrissey are among the celebrity panel that will duke it out on the latest version of CBC radio’s “Canada Reads.” Selected books are: Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Song of Kahunsha, Natasha and Other Stories, Children of My Heart, and Stanley Park.” Bill Richardson will again referee the debates, which will run from Feb. 26 to March 2, 2007, on CBC Radio One. [more]

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	Asides, Canada Reads	Posted at 1:43 pm (27 Nov 2006)