Despite the growth of handheld video devices and TV shows on the internet, people still spend more than 9 out of 10 hours watching TV the old-fashioned way, on regular sets.

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.

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	Integration, Interactive TV, Programming	Posted at 12:21 pm (30 Apr 2009)

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?

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	Interactive TV, Technology	Posted at 8:13 am (09 Jan 2009)

The CBC’s Toronto broadcast centre will host an interesting panel Wednesday on the future of news. It’ll explore how technology — such as citizen journalism and Web 2.0 tools — can be used by the media to provide greater public service to citizens and communities.

Participants include:

• Andrew Keen, author, The Cult of the Amateur
• Leonard Brody, CEO, NowPublic.com
• Rahaf Harfoursh, Research Coordinator, “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”

There are only a handful of public seats available, so you may want to tune in online. It’ll be streamed live at cbc.ca/futureofnews (where a discussion forum is open now) and segments from the discussion will appear on CBC TV and CBC Radio.

Happens Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time.

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	Digital Radio, Interactive TV, On-Demand TV	Posted at 5:38 am (16 Oct 2007)

People who watch CBC Newsworld on certain Bell Expressvu satellite receivers have a new option: The ability to scroll through headlines on-demand. The service, CBC News Plus, lets viewers get more detail on specific news and sports stories from a list of the latest headlines while watching the regular broadcast at the same time.
     I’ve got it and tried it. It works, but it’s not quite the “fully interactive experience” that a breathlessly excited Bell news release suggests. I mean yes, you can scroll through headlines and ‘click’ to read an abstract of the story. But that’s about it.
     It’s a nice enhancement but not Earth-shattering.

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	CBC Newsworld, Interactive TV	Posted at 3:40 pm (21 Nov 2006)