Radio 3 Launches a New Site
CBC Radio 3 launched a redesigned web site this morning. The revamp has been in the works for over a year, and it includes updates to the music player, the introduction of four new streams, a playlist editor and a bunch of social media tools.
In the video below, Steve Pratt, the director of Radio 3, provides a quick tour of some of the new features, focusing mostly on the new radio streams.
As Pratt says in the video above “there used to be just one web radio station, now there’s five.” In addition to the main Radio 3 stream, there’s also streams for pop, rock, hiphop and electronic music.
Additionally the new site includes many social media features, many of which are unique to Radio 3, like creating personal playlists, the ability to forward tracks to friends, and the ability to sign in and create user profiles on the site. Thankfully the site is also larger and exposes more of the blog posts and content, including concert calenders.
“The goal was to showcase more of what CBC Radio 3 has to offer than just our blog and the streaming radio service. We found with our old design, many people didn’t know that all the music played on CBC Radio 3 has been uploaded by musicians and that there are over 18,000 artists and over 80,000 songs on the website to browse through, discover, and share with others,” Pratt said on the site this morning.
Another feature of the new site is the thumbs up or thumbs down feature which allows users to rate the songs and according to Pratt “will let us improve the music programming on CBC Radio 3 by understanding which songs have stronger (or weaker) reaction from listeners.”
Overall the reaction to the new site is generally positive, although some users have reported bugs on a few features while others are having problems with the streams.
A guide to the new Radio 3 site is available here, there are also a bunch of tutorial videos on YouTube here. If you spot a bug or something wacky with the site you can send it to the developers here.
What do you think of the new site?
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Of course the toothless official blog of the CBC would claim that “the reaction to the new site is generally positive,” though that clearly must be false if ‘users have reported bugs [and] are having problems with the streams.” If R3 needs an entire YouTube channel to teach people how to use the new site, is the site not a failure?
R3 is like an inverse Michael Enright: An institution that’s beyond official reproach.
FO, actually, that was based on fact – the consensus of the comments on Facebook, Twitter and the R3 blog post were generally positive. Further having tutorial material on YouTube is more a service than an indication of failure.
Either way I find your attitude tiresome. Listen, you write a blog. I write a blog. I’m not envious or jealous or your blog, in fact I don’t care about your blog, how about you not care about mine.
Fan boy debate!
Hopefully the new R3 site supports more than IE as a browser. CBC IT only supports IE. Tough shirt Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari and any other browser you employees choose to use.
CBC HR doesn’t care if your HR or IO page does n;t work properly from home
The corporate browser standard for internal applications has no bearing on public CBC sites whatsoever. And while I would agree that the current standard is not the best – I’d prefer that apps were required to conform to actual web standards rather than targeting a specific vendor’s crappy product – it is important to have a standard, to keep the support cost sane if nothing else.
FWIW, the radio3.cbc.ca site validates as XHTML 1.0 (apart from one frameset attribute) so it’s actually one of the better examples of CBC online offerings in this regard.
Glad no lock out until 2014 says: Hopefully the new R3 site supports more than IE as a browser. CBC IT only supports IE.
I’m running the new R3 site on Firefox (previous R3 version also). Don’t know what you’re complaining about.
Knowing how the bureaucrats run the joint didn’t know if the internal IT narrow mindedness about not officially supporting crappy products like Safari and Firefox would be imposed on the public sites. Don’t see what the grief is supporting a couple of different browsers considering most staff useFirefox as their browser as opposed to IE
As for standards the Corp decided a few years ago that substandard camera work, editing would make it to air, all in the name of keeping costs sane by eliminating camerawomen/men and editors.
An awful lot of intranet apps are written for specific browsers, usually IE thanks to MS’ historical desktop OS monopoly. The rationale behind it is that since you have a corporate standard, you can write stuff that works with that and not double or triple up on your development and support costs.
Like I said, I also think that this is misguided (though for different reasons than you) and in the imaginary land of Kevonia the corporate policy is that said apps must conform to web standards and not use OS-specific extensions. Unfortunately Kevonia is – as yet – but a dream.
But this will never – never! – impact the CBC’s public web sites, because the same logic – covering as many users as possible, as efficiently as possible – when applied to a public and heterogeneous audience, argues for compatibility with as many modern browsers as possible.
Again, personally I feel that this could be best achieved by cleaving to web standards but there are practical issues to consider. Not every browser renders the same, for a start.
Still no URL addresses I can bookmark.
I was sure the redesign would improve this situation – why can’t the pages load like normal web pages?
The permalink button should not be required.
The idea of this Kevonia is intriguing perhaps one day it will flourish.
Alas image, editing and audio quality seems not to be important for some of the news stories that go to air for the corp, the same fate my fall to the IT side of things one day.
Writing to standards (and one level down from
b(leeding) edge ones) means that a lot of programmes can read the CBC. Just as they would never use san-serif type in their postings as it is more difficult to read that the Times Roman serif family that is used in the daily newspaper.
CBC is Auntie and doesn’t change much. Old ways were better, and they could buy the National Post and provide a print version of the CBC everyday for vastly more influence and coverage.
Bring back steam-powered radio-telegraphs.
Don’t forget the linotype machine.
“Now with bold”
Watch out for the liquid metal.
Yes I am that old.
Saw one in action when I was very young.