The final hockey game between Pittsburgh and Montreal drew 130,000 views online. That represents about 3 per cent of the total audience. The television audience also set records. Drawing 4.2 million viewers, it ranked as the 6th largest audience for a playoff game.

Overall a significant and growing number of people are watching the games online. The Sports department has served up 1.5 million online streams to date, almost tripling the number of streams since last year.

BBM says the increase is because the new meters can capture passive viewing, particularly viewing outside the home.

This came out a presentation yesterday at Advertising Week by Kathy Gardner, SVP of strategic insight and research at Canwest Broadcasting, and Rob Dilworth, VP of research at CTV Television. They also said PPM has the potential to measure other types of video and audio content, like video on demand, online clips, and commercials.

e-Radio-Inc. (ERI) and CBC/Radio-Canada today announced that they have successfully tested a new technology that could revolutionize the way electricity is consumed across Canada and around the world.

What? The CBC is revolutionizing “the way electricity is consumed?” I started wondering if Red Green had duct taped together a cold fusion reactor. But no, it turns out that the CBC has partnered with this company, e-Radio-Inc, to broadcast instructions that make your home appliances much more miserly by consuming cheaper electricity, saving you money, and helping the environment. They successfully tested the system today.

Intrigued?

Here’s how it works.

The company embeds inaudible signals in radio broadcasts. In the test they used a Radio 2 broadcast. Little receivers – they’re size of a dime – in household appliances listen for, and interpret, the signals. The signals contain data on things like the state of the electrical grid, such as the current price of electricity or when the grid is getting overloaded. Kind of like a newscast for your dishwasher.

The appliances then listen to those ‘newscasts’ and decides what do, based criteria that you’ve inputted. So say you program your thermostat to turn off your when the price of electricity starts spiking on hot summer days. The receiver in the thermostat listens to the ‘newscast’ for the price of electricity, and once it gets too high, it turns down your air conditioner. That saves you money and helps the environment.

The technology is part of global movement towards making electrical grids more efficient, called smart grids.

Right now in cities across the countries electrical utilities are installing smart electrical meters that allow consumers to monitor their electrical use and alter when they use their appliances. This technology allows consumers to essentially train their appliances to do the same task.

Jackson Wang, the president of e-Radio says that with the technology will have both financial and environmental benefits, “there’s no silver bullet in the smart grid but this is pretty close.” Wang said this afternoon he’s aiming for a “10 to 25 per cent reductions in electrical use.”

Right now the technology is being tested with various appliances, including dishwashers, fridges, washer/dryers, stoves, microwaves and hot water heaters.

He decided the CBC was the perfect partner for the technology because it’s the only broadcaster with national radio coverage. CBC/Radio-Canada’s FM signals reach close to 99% of Canadians. He added using radio has advantages over using the internet because it doesn’t bog down from high traffic. “Radio is like a dedicated channel, radio can’t be knocked out by congestion, it’s a direct communication,”  he said. “An IP based solution is actually quite fragile.”

“This is an innovative way for CBC/Radio-Canada to maximize the use of its radio infrastructure for the benefit of both Canadian consumers and the environment,” said Michel Tremblay, Senior Vice-President, Corporate Strategy & Business Partnerships at the ceeb, said in the press release this afternoon.

Wang says he hopes the technology will cover the entire country to 2011, and first products based on this technology, smart electrical thermostats will hit the market later this year.

“We will be there on whatever platform you need us to be on,” Stursberg said at a Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto on Tuesday.

Strursberg highlighted a couple portable platforms that have become immensely popular with the public, the iPhone and iPod. The CBC served 787,000 podcasts in May, and the iPhone site clocked 920,000 page views.

He also said the web site has almost doubled its audience, from 2.23 million unique visitors five years ago, to 4.45 million uniques today.

Stursberg also tackled the cannibalization argument – the fear that offering too much content online will diminish a television audience.  He said the CBC was concerned that its heavy online offering for the Olympics would cannibalize its television coverage, but it never happened. Instead the reverse occurred; viewers found the online coverage complementary.

Fast Company recently called NPR “the most successful hybrid of old and new media,” speculating that the organization may well end up “saving the news.” A recent post in Mashable titled “Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media” takes the same tack.

Both articles commend NPR for a strategy that puts the audience first while embracing new media. “They’re on a trajectory that will make them a media powerhouse in the future, though, and it is in large part due to their culture of open access,” Mashable’s Josh Catone explains, “The blueprint that NPR is drawing for the future is very promising.”

So how does the CBC compare to NPR? And what can the CBC learn from them?

NPR’s blueprint is actually a three-pronged strategy. They are fanatically devoted to local news, they’ve jumped head-first into social media, and they are commited to open access – putting the content where people consume it.

On the first plank of NPR’s strategy, the CBC compares well. The CBC is again committing to local news, it already has a large local footprint – CBC Radio One alone operates 36 stations across the country.

So the CBC is well positioned to take advantage of what NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller calls “big, gaping hole” in local coverage. Schiller says that “commercial radio has abandoned the local market,” local newspapers are in trouble and large media organizations like the New York Times can’t cover all the local markets. This creates an opportunity that both broadcasters can exploit with high-quality local content.

The CBC also mirrors NPR’s strategy for social media. Both broadcasters have a big presence on Twitter, Facebook and iTunes; the “ceeb” ranks 11 podcasts in the top 100 in Canada, way more than any other Canadian broadcaster.

But it’s on the third prong of NPR’s strategy where the comparisons begin to break down. NPR is commited to open distribution “they have an organizational level commitment to allowing listeners and readers to access their content on their own terms,” Catone writes.

On the face of it that strategy sounds a lot like the CBC mantra of delivering content “when, where and how you want it,” but NPR’s commitment goes much further than the CBC’s.

For the last several years, and the last two or three in particular, there’s been quite a bit of tension at the CBC between those who feel that the CBC content should be seeded all over the web, including external sites like YouTube, and those that feel that the wider web should be used to drive the audience back to cbc.ca.

“To grow audiences and to stay relevant, media companies have to reach audiences where they are – and they are all over the place,” Steve Pratt, a CBC Radio executive wrote in May, illustrating one side of the argument. On the other hand, others at the corporation feel that this strategy is both time-consuming and provides no revenue. They would prefer keep the content on sites where it can make the most money.

At the CBC this debate between having the content follow the people, or the people follow the content has not been resolved, different shows follow different strategies. At NPR, by contrast, the debate is over.

NPR’s news boss, Ellen Weiss said “We need to put NPR wherever the audience is, and that has to happen online and has to happen on the radio.”

As Schiller explains NPR’s strategy extends beyond it’s own website, “I want the traffic to increase, but to me the ultimate goal is not just bringing people to this walled garden that is NPR.org,” she told mediabistro.com in April. “The idea is to create this network. And then once that is set up, I want to count traffic for the whole thing, and aggregate that into one number.”

Unlike the CBC, NPR is committed, from top to bottom, to going to its audience rather than making its audience come to them. “We have to skate where the puck is going,” Schiller said in a Fast Company article in March. And for a company as cash-strapped as NPR, it’s worth noting how much they’ve committed to the digital strategy. Last year they introduced a open platform to let listeners mix their own podcasts, and, get this, they are putting all of their employees, every single editor, producer and reporter, through multimedia training.

Training all of their content producer’s in multimedia goes way beyond the CBC’s strategy of beseeching us to “think” of ourselves as content producers for multiple platforms. NPR is actually showing all their content employees how to do it.

“It’s got very smart people thinking about its online strategy,” media pundit Jeff Jarvis said about NPR “Like the BBC, it sees itself as a public trust, so its aim is to get its content distributed as widely as possible. Old media expected us to come to them. Now they need to come to us.”

The strategy is paying dividends, traffic to npr.org went up 78 per cent between 2007 and 2008, and since 1999 it’s radio audience has nearly doubled.

But the consequence of how this debate is resolved at the CBC goes beyond audience share and site traffic, it speaks to the relevancy of the entire organization. As consultant and social media strategist Justin Beach wrote recently, “One day the old guard of Canadian media will wake up and realize that rather than lock the barbarian hordes out, they’ve locked themselves in and by then the ‘hordes’ will not longer care whether the gate is open or closed.”

According to a survey from CBC’s research department, people spent 97 per cent of their time watching programming on regular TV sets, or with PVR’s, DVD’s or video on demand. Only two per cent of the total watching time was committed to watching television online.

The results seem to indicate that although Canadians spend a lot of time surfing online, they are not yet spending much of that time watching television shows. The average Anglophone Canadian now spends just shy of 14 hours a week online, compared to 15 hours a week watching TV.

Of the video content that is being watched online, amateur video is still the most popular, but it’s not growing in popularity. On the flip side watching professionally produced television online is growing quickly. More than one quarter of Anglophone internet users said spent time watching online TV in the last month, an increase  of 50% since last year.

And what are they watching? News. Of all the types of online TV content, news clips or newscasts are the most popular by a mile – 73 per cent of respondents said they had watched news clips or shows in the last month, sports came in a distant second at 46 per cent.

The survey results are based on 6,000 telephone interviews with Anglophone adults residing in all regions of Canada. The interviews were conducted from October 20, 2008 to December 21, 2008 and are considered accurate within plus or minus 1.3 percentage points 19 times out of 20. For more information on the survery contact the CBC/Radio-Canada Research and Strategic Analysis department.

Tonight at 8:01 PM the One Million Acts of Green campaign passed the one million mark.

In just over a hundred days the campaign has attracted thousands and thousands of users from over 50 countries and over a million acts of green.

Now full disclosure, I work on this campaign, but I do think it represents another significant milestone for online campaigns at the CBC. This campaign lived on several different shows. The Hour had the lead but CBC News: Morning, Living, Steven and Chris and CBC Kids also contributed and no single show totally owned the initiative. It was a network initiative.

It also spanned across different platforms, there were many television and radio elements, but most of the action was on the internet – where people did the Acts of Green. That content was fed back to the programming units.

In effect the online activity drove some of the broadcast programming. The model was essentially the reverse of how we usually devote our resources – concentrating on television and radio broadcasts, and then re-purposing that content for the internet. In this campaign the online content became the broadcast content.

The campaign was also unique in that in relied on a social network to achieve a single goal – to get to One Million Acts of Green – as oppossed to dispersed activity in countless clusters that is the norm for social networking sites. And it worked.

Thanks to one great idea and the participation of thousands of Canadians.

“In 2009, Internet radio may not just reinvigorate the medium of radio. It may reinvent it.” This prediction comes from the consulting firm Deloitte, which has published annual reports on upcoming media trends for the last eight years.

If the report is correct, 2009 will see much more widespread adoption of WiFi enabled internet radio sets (like the one pictured above). These sets, which retail for about $200, are designed to connect to digital radio signals from around the world via the internet.

“It’s the future of radio,” Alex Bowden, a salesman at Bay and Bloor Radio in downtown Toronto, said to The Financial Post. He said the store has seen an uptick in sales of the devices, especially over Christmas, as prices have gone down.

Deloitte sees this as a major opportunity for radio broadcasters.

There are about 2.5 billion analog radio sets in the world, and conventional radio broadcasts will continue to serve those listeners for the next few years, but the internet has 1.5 billion users, two-thirds of which have broadband. Serving the internet market properly could lead to substantial numbers of new listeners both from people listening at work on computers and from these new digital radio sets.

Digital radio also has the advantage over satellite radio in that the sets usually don’t require subscriptions. Currently only about a quarter of the worlds 44,000 radio stations broadcast online but that will likely increase as digital radio sets become more popular.

Not everyone agrees on the potential for internet radio though. David Bray, a radio industry analyst, told the The Financial Post, it was “wildly improbable,” that internet radio would led to widespread shift. He said it’s too early to tell if most consumers would spend a couple hundred dollars on new sets.

The Deloitte report concludes that although digital radio represents a big opportunity for broadcasters, they need to make the station easy to search and find by building electronic program guides and recommendation engines. Broadcasters also need to ensure that ensure that their content is listing on the large aggregators site like RadioTower. Finally there are still issues that need to be resolved about music royalties.

What do you think? Will internet radio change the face of the medium, or will it another internet related innovation that doesn’t live up to its promise?

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Samsung and Yahoo introduced new technology that will bring the internet into your TV.

I think this is a game changer. This initiative and others like it will have a profound impact on television, and the people that make TV, in the near future.

Boo-Keun Yoon, one Samsung’s executive vice-presidents, said: “It’s frankly way beyond just passively watching broadcasts and is no doubt the future of TV.”

The technology allows users to overlay Yahoo widgets on their television screens. Essentially it allows you to control what you see on the screen, beyond just changing channels. So for instance you could be watching Jeopardy while getting streaming stock quotes, hockey scores, or weather updates overlaid beside Alex Trebek.

This approach sidesteps one of the biggest problems that has been delaying the advent of the internet on televisions. The problem is that the internet is not by nature a broadcaster. It’s built to delivers millions of different web pages to billions of different people. But if the if tries to deliver the same web page to billions of people, it crashes. Think of 9/11 when everyone had to turn to TV to get their updates because all the online news sites crashed.

Using Yahoo widgets (a widget is a software module that you can customize and install on many different devices such as iPods, televisions or web pages) sidesteps the this problem because there are thousands of widgets that deliver niche content from different sources. Combine the niche content of internet widgets with the mass appeal of television broadcasts and you’ve got the best of both worlds.

“Yahoo has combined key attributes of the Internet, including openness, community, and personalization, with the power of television,” Patrick Barry, VP of Connected TV Yahoo, said in a yesterday.

It allows television to do what television is good at – simultaneously broadcasting to millions of people – while pairing that content with what the internet is good at – narrow, focused, niche interests. Think CNN but where you get to pick what goes in the ticker, or watching a hockey game with a fan chat room, or Jamie Oliver with the recipes displayed on the side of the screen. It’s clearly much more engaging than present day television.

Yahoo’s own developers and those from eBay, MySpace, CBS, The New York Times, Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster, Showtime, USA TODAY, and Twitter, among others, are involved in the effort.

What do you think of this new technology? Is this something the CBC should be getting involved in?

The campaign is one of several innovative CBC campaigns being developed by the CBC in unison with corporate sponsors as advertisers become increasingly interested in non-traditional campaigns. The One Million Acts of Green campaign was developed as part of a partnership with Cisco.

Several other include the Campbell’s Chunky – Football Meets Food campaign, which won Paul Abrams, who works in marketing and sales, a Marketing Magazine Gold Medal Award for media innovation; as well as the Hockey Night Mashup and the Kraft Hockeyville competition.

Now in the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I work on the One Million Acts of Green campaign. The objective is to ask Canadians to commit one million environmental acts between now and July 2009. The campaign is well ahead schedule, having reached the half million mark in less than two months. It is one of the largest campaigns the CBC has ever done outside of hockey properties.

“What makes the non-traditional revenue so important is that the possibilities are endless and we are only held back by our imaginations and our ability to prove to advertisers that it will provide them an opportunity to be seen, in a place, or space, that their competitors are not,” Abrams said.

What do you think of these sorts of non-traditional campaigns?

Contrary to most leading opinion in the space, traditional media is not, in fact, being threatened by technologies like Internet television and iPods. Further, it would be a waste of time to create Internet-only content if the goal is to generate advertising revenue.

That’s the CBC’s official position, as articulated in a submission last week to the CRTC titled Reject Old Assumptions About New Media.

The document is a short 13-page PDF document. Here is my summary of its main points.

(CBC management: Like all carbon-based life forms, I make mistakes. I’ve made several here before. If I’ve misinterpreted something, please join the discussion in the comments. And hey, just for fun, shall we assume silence means I’ve got it right? <grin>)

1. Traditional TV and radio usage is not being displaced by the Internet.
2. Amateur video will never be a substitute for traditional media, particularly entertainment programming.
3. It would be a waste time for traditional media companies to create Internet-only content if the goal is to generate advertising revenue.
4. Most Canadians use the Internet primarily as a communications and research tool (Ed: Implying that most Canadians do not use the Internet for entertainment.)
5. The trend is towards personalizing and controlling media, not developing new ways to consume it.

The points argued by the CBC in its submission appear diametrically opposed to the opinions of most thought-leaders who work in new media and broadcasting. The Corporation, downplaying the amount of opinion to the contrary, admits it stands largely alone in its assessment of the current landscape:

“There appears to be an assumption in some [Ed: Emphasis added] industry literature that broadcasting content found on new media is reducing the consumption of traditional radio and television…. This broad assumption is false, and empirical data refute this hypothesis.”

My opinion: One can’t dispute the hard numbers — they’re sourced from reputable organizations like BBM Neilson Media Research. (Although I’m afraid I just can not accept the stat quoted that fewer than 1% of Canadians watch broadcast television over the Internet.)

More than that, I’m concerned that the submission illustrates only the current reality — there’s no articulation of any vision for the future here.

• We have producers who are winning prestigious international awards as they develop new forms of entertainment media. Did we ask them where they think we should be going? I’d rather put my money on the “gut feel” of those folks than statistical forecasts generated from surveys and focus groups conducted months ago — remember “months” is an eternity in today’s new media world.
• We have an industry-leading media research team in Toronto. Were they tasked to chart out likely scenarious using widely available results from other public broadcasters around the world? Did we meet with the BBC or ABC or NPR to get a sense where we’ll be in ten years? If so, what do they think?

The conclusions in this submission seem way off base to me, and it lack of vision scares me.

Then again, I also have a mortgage to pay. So I’ll shut up now and turn it over to you.

What do you think?
Note: If you’re a CBC insider, consider posting your thoughts from your home computer. I’m just sayin’. Besides, shouldn’t you be working right now and not reading the semi-coherent ramblings of a freelance radio producer?

CBC’s Response

Hey Tod,

I am worried that some of your contributors may be taking your synopsis of our submission, which highlights only a couple of its points, as the sum total of our position.

To be clear, CBC/Radio-Canada believes that the new media world is a large and important part of its future. It is a central pillar of the strategic themes identified in the Challenge Us! process. Providing space for Canadian expression on the maximum number of platforms that Canadians want to use to consume media is, we believe and multiple Parliamentary committees have confirmed, now part of our mandate. As you know, we are expending a lot of energy and creativity on developing new ways of providing that space either using current resources or by finding new ways of generating funds.

Last week’s submission was not our last word on the subject. The Commission will initiate a broad review in the fall and we intend, as usual, to submit a fully developed, forward-looking position that describes our role and how it fits into the larger system.

Last week’s filing was a preliminary one, in response to the CRTC’s initial question of whether it was framing the issues properly. We did not want the public debate to move forward and public policy decisions to be contemplated based on what we perceived to be two faulty assumptions in the Commission’s framing of the issues. And those are:

1. That the consumption of broadcasting content found on new media is replacing the consumption of traditional broadcast media, particularly television; and

2. That new media represents a major business opportunity for Canadian broadcasters.

Today and, to the extent that we can foresee, into the future, the vast majority of high quality broadcast content found on any platform is going to be produced by traditional broadcasters. Public policy decisions based on the assumption that that supply of quality Canadian content will be financed by a one-for-one shift of revenue from traditional to new media would lead to a severe weakening of the country’s main creators of Canadian broadcasting content.

That is not the CRTC’s intention and we want to ensure that the debate from the outset reflects not only the future potential but the current reality of the new media universe.

Thanks,

Steven Guiton
Regulatory Affairs

Ken Gibson and Peggy Oldfield have put together a comprehensive online newsletter under the Employee Assistance Program for CBC staffers and retirees living in Vancouver and B.C.

The site offers memories from CBC archives, provides a home to the CBC 20 Year association, and helpful information on the EAP. The newsletters are composed quarterly, corresponding with each season, and are packed with CBC news and interesting tidbits.

It also provides the service “Where Are They Now?“, on which the authors post the current careers and whereabouts of past CBC B.C. colleagues. This is definitely a site worth subscribing to for any employee or alumni in the B.C. area.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.