The CRTC has approved CBC/Radio-Canada’s application operate nested FM transmitters in Windsor. The CRTC received several favourable interventions regarding the application, and that it rejected oppositions filed by Neeti Ray and CTVgm. The CBC has two years to get the transmitters in order. (Hat tip to Gary.)

George Stroumboulopoulos has people stopping him to shake his hand in many American states because of The Hour’s popularity due to widespread viewing on YouTube.

The Canadian Press reports that The Hour has been getting millions of hits on YouTube since the show started uploading segments last fall. The Hour is also one of the top video podcasts in Canada on iTunes. Strombo says that the show has a wide appeal since it fills a gap in late-night TV; unlike other late-night shows, it isn’t pure comedy.

Viewers as far afield as New Zealand and Australia are also members of the shows’ Facebook group.

Easy come, easy go.

After all of the happy stories in the last little while about the CBC website being unblocked in China, a CBC employee was not amused to learn that the Radio-Canada site has now been blocked in China again.

Cedric Sam, an Internet Analyst for Radio-Canada, posted an article about this on his own blog in French. Here is a translated summary of the article:

“For six months, the website of Radio-Canada was blocked to internet users in Continental China. A week after Hubert Lacroix sent a letter to the Chinese Ambassador regarding this situation, the Chinese were allowed to view Radio-Canada.ca and CBC.ca.

“While on a trip in the Chinese province of Guangdong, I noticed that while in Shenzhen Radio-Canada.ca was not accessible. A “server not responding” message appeared when I tried to access both the portal site and the news site, while CBC.ca was accessible.

“Two friends in Beijing confirmed with me the next morning that the Radio-Canada website was not available there either.”

In other news…

MSNBC.com has launched an suite of news tools dubbed NewsWare that includes the more pedestrian e-mail alerts, how to add MSNBC to your mobile device, and RSS feeds, but they also include some mindblowing applications that make reading the news much more recreational and interactive

Spectra Newsreader

The Spectra Newsreader allows you to choose your preferred news subjects. The stories pertaining to these subjects then swirl around the screen, eventually being pulled down to your menu. You can either read the story that is in front of you, or save it to your newsreader and go on to the next. You can also change the display properties of the tool to a more traditional ticker style rather than the swirling spiral that makes your screen look like a tornado of headlines. My only beef with this was that you couldn’t actually click on a story until it had been “pulled down” to the bottom - once they get that worked out this will be genius.

NewsScroller

This tool can be added to whatever social media you prefer - MySpace, Yahoo, your Google front page, and Facebook to name a few. Adding it to Facebook is a painless process, and the ticker is graphically attractive. The one glitch encountered was that if you customize the ticker to your favourite news subjects before you add it to Facebook, you’ll have to go back and do it again once you finally do add it.

Decision ‘08 Leaderboard
This funky widget may also be added to your social media in the same style as the NewsScroller. Want an up-to-the-minute report on everything US election? Install this to ensure that you know down to the candidate how Hilary and Obama are doing. We imagine that this will be adapted and added to throughout the election process to make it more exciting.

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.

The CBC has re-launched its YouTube Channel.

Even though full-length shows are available, for the most part, on the CBC web site, the YouTube channel ensures that those searching for things like the Rick Mercer Report end up getting the videos from the source, not from some reposting hack.

The new YouTube channel incorporates lots of functionality allowing users to personalize their content. Users can favorite videos, subscribe to shows and share videos with their friends.

It’s all part of our evil plan to take over the Internet. Mwahahaha! Actually, truth be told, we probably decided to re-launch when that last bastion of stodginess, the Royal Family, launched their own channel on YouTube. Can’t hold out much longer after seeing that exciting content going live.

High-definition television shows everything — from the tiniest birds in the sky to the tiniest blemishes on your face. From Al Thompkins of Poynter Online comes this word of makeup specifically designed for the HDTV world.

CBC’s I.T. department is extending its “Detox” program until May 18 (four extra weeks) and have prepared some FAQ’s that should answer your questions about our upcoming archiving system.

Attention: Radio engineers and transmission geeks

Sorry about the short notice, but at 12:00 noon (ET) today, the Radio World magazine will hold a webinar called “Audio Over IP for Broadcast?: Learn from the Experts.”

Among the items they’ll cover:

• What Quality of Service is Required?
• Can I Use the Public Internet?
• What Bandwidth Will I Need?
• What Packet Size Should I Use?
• How Can I Deal With Network Jitter?
• Is Delay Inevitable?
• Should I Use Multicasting or Unicasting?
• What Algorithm Should I Use?
• What Is SIP? Why Might I Need It?
• How Can I Build-In Redundancy To My Link?
• What Pitfalls Should I Be Aware of?

It’s free (and probably slightly promotional in nature) and you need to pre-register.

Back aches, eye strain and carpal tunnel syndrome are just a few common work-related injuries. Find out how to set up your work space to avoid these and other injuries.

The volume of spam messages received by CBC/Radio-Canada has grown from about one million messages each week in 2006 to near seven million today. That accounts for over 90% of the 1.5 million messages processed by our e-mail servers on a daily basis. 

Just a quick note for those of you (CBC employees) who work in Toronto and use or work with Linux. There will be a CBC Linux Users’ Group on Thursday, April 10th at noon in 3G200 (the “Idea Room” near the blue elevators).

April’s topic will be “Using Linux to Access CBC Corporate Services: What Works and What Doesn’t”. They’ll review known methods by which Linux users can access GroupWise, Novell Netware shares, other Windows applications, Contivity VPN, etc. and what Linux distributions have been known to work well.

The meeting will be followed by an escorted tour of the National Data Centre for all those interested.