CBC Television vice-president Richard Stursberg gave an interview to Report On Business Television recently about the CBC’s business model. It’s actually quite an interesting discussion. Nice to see a longer-form Q&A about the issues at hand. Usually these things get reduced to a quote or two in a newspaper.
My source: CBC Communications told me the interview happened and I tracked down the audio and made it an MP3 file.
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Mr. Stursberg reports that “nobody watches PBS”. I would consider that statement mean and unrepresentative of the importance of the American Public Broadcaster. Perhaps the numbers of viewers watching PBS is small and Stursberg, who measures his success by ratings points, suggests that “nobody is watching”.
But one look at PBS and you find a TV schedule that is unique and offers viewers a true alternative in all sorts of programming 7 days a week. The simple assumption that a show isn’t any good if its ratings are low, is not the way to run a network, in my opinion. It requires leadership and vision and a desire to be unique rather than copy reality shows, such as The One, simply for the revenue. Clearly, upper management needs to work harder at getting more government funding and to stop chasing ratings. Private broadcasters have a point when considering CBC’s public funding and its participation in competing for ad revenues, but until the funding formula changes, it’s always going to be this way.
Nevertheless, I find the programmers at CBC over-think their audience and are afraid of taking risks. They believe that becoming more like the competition is not the way to go. Like the movie about baseball, “if you build it [they] will come”. Let the CBC chase ideas, instead.