As far as how many stations do we need? I don’t know but I say let the viewers decide. We don’t limit the number of websites so if space is available why limit the number of television stations?

How many more stations do we need anyhow? There are only so many people with so many hours in the day to watch TV. I imagine that more channels means the viewing audience is divided into smaller parts per channel, it gets harder for individual channels to make money.

Even so, compression techniques could and intelligent use of the broadcast spectrum could dramatically increase the amount of stations that could broadcast within the current allotment. Even in Toronto, with the use of digital technologies, we’d have no problem having many more stations.

If it becomes clogged then you could reserve some spectrum for essential channels and sell the rest to the highest bidder.

According to the stats on the site, the majority of people reading this blog are (a) employees of CBC, and (b) visiting the page manually.

Obviously, if the CRTC mandate was just to manage the radio spectrum, this wouldn’t be relevant, and they should butt out. But they also have a cultural mandate, so if TV is moving to online (whether live or on-demand), they have to at least look at it and see if they can apply that part of said mandate in a world where media is unicast (there has to be a better term than this) over TCP/IP rather than broadcast OTA or via cable. It’s perfectly reasonable if you ask me.

How is video or radio that uses the internet to transport packets any different from video or radio that uses transmissions towers or co-axial cable?

Digital Cable uses Internet protocols to deliver its signal to homeowners. HD over the air signals also use internet technologies to deliver signals, so we regulate radio and television, then we should also regulate the internet.

For what its worth, I don’t think the CRTC should be regulating television, radio or the internet since the real difference is the delivery mechanism, not the content.

Fair points. And you’re right, I don’t think the CRTC should regulate the Internet. The primary difference between terrestrial broadcasting and the Internet is that terrestrial broadcasting is finite — there’s only so much space available in the broadcast spectrum. If every person who wanted to popped a radio station of whatever power they wanted up, the airwaves would be clogged and useless.

The Internet, on the other hand, has no such finite limit. — Tod

The Hour also only has 1,400 fans on its Facebook page. Compare this to the CBC show JPod which had 3,000 members on its Facebook page after only a few episodes, and still has over 4,000 members in spite of being cancelled weeks ago. CBC Radio 3’s Facebook page has about 5,000 members.

Very few people are watching The Hour in Canada so why would people outside of Canada be interested in it? George is a nice person but he’s a middle aged man with very little education who has never lived outside of his small part of Canada for any significant length of time. In other words, he is a local yokel who has neither the education nor the worldly experience to enable him to conduct good interviews which are of interest to a national Canadian audience. The Hour is a very weak show that is not interesting or culturally relevant to the vast majority of young Canadians, and not surprisingly it draws very low audience numbers. The fact that George would be hired and then retained as host of a show like this is a very good example of the extent to which cronyism has taken over at the TBC, however.

The secret to our success will be Wheel of Fortune, as one Regional Director has already said publically. We’ll get a good lead in, our numbers will go up, and the all staff note will congratulate us on our excellent work and tell us that this is a sign that audiences love our new action news style presentation.

I want our numbers to go up, I want as many people as possible to be tuning in to CBC for high quality news, but doing it through Wheel of Fortune seems dirty, like it’s cheating. We can’t get away from the fact that we’ve under resourced our supper hour shows. Now we’re expecting people to do more with less and focusing on style over substance. Oh and we’ll steal some resources from radio through integration.

In moderation all those can be healthy, but we still need to take the time and energy to produce high quality journalism. Our audiences aren’t dumb. If we don’t deliver the goods behind that snappy headline our audiences will see through it and switch back to CTV our City which can out hype us any day of the week.

I asked Jon Dube from CBCnews.ca about this earlier today and he hasn’t responded yet, but it seems like the comments are back in place. My guess is a technical glitch.

Hanomansing doesn’t age, he *ripens*.

Check out Handsome Man Thing’s specs at the end of this CBC Digitial Archives clip.

Whoa! Those are some glasses! (end of clip)

But we’re getting off-topic here. I think that CBC’s classical-Euro-music fans ought to eventually get a “Radio 4″ operation to enjoy, so the rest of the country can get on with whatever else we’re doing.