The CBC Canoe
On Wednesday, Quebecor Media launched Canoe.TV, a free online video webcasting service. And it’s chock full of CBC content.
The site, available with both English and French content, features both live and on-demand content in a variety of categories. The on-demand programs lean heavily on CBC Television:
- the drama category is currently exclusively CBC (Jozi-H, October 1970, North/South and 49th & Main).
- the comedy area features Getting Along Famously and the Rick Mercer Report (season 3).
- the News & Documentaries category currently has only Mansbridge One on One.
Other channels are decidedly mixed fare from other broadcasters: ultimate fighting, yoga, home renovations, Sunshine Girl TV (“Ashley, is a 5-foot-7 Scorpio who’s way into motorcycles and cars…”) and Club Scene (mostly more T&A).
Live programming varies (right now I’m watching a Bollywood movie; programming comes from broadcasters in India, Portugal, Jamaica, UAE and Pakistan via Toronto-based Jump TV.)
According to Playback, “to monetize Canoe.TV, Quebecor Media will share online advertising revenue with content partners.” CBC is one of those content partners.
Bob Kerr, director of business development for CBC, says this is one of dozens of partnerships designed to increase exposure, including YouTube.
“It’s exposure, it’s reaching an audience we can’t guarantee we’d reach otherwise,” he says. “We can’t be arrogant enough to assume that anything we put up on our site people will come over and watch it. This improves the chances of them coming to CBC-TV or CBC.ca.”
Kerr points out that the content being offered on Canoe.TV is neither exclusive, nor the sort of “premium” content that is currently hosted and/or sponsored on CBC.ca, or sold through other venues.
“It’s a big, sophisticated platform on the Canadian space – why wouldn’t we want to be a part of it?”
What do you think? Increased exposure is good, and I certainly hope we see some revenue – though right now there aren’t many ads – but it bugs me to see online content that isn’t available via CBC.ca. And doesn’t it look weird seeing our chief correspondent under the logo of what some might call the competition? Or is this distribution, not competition? How about YouTube?
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/facepalm
/headdesk
/sob
If I can watch old episodes of the King of Kensington on Sun TV, why not old episodes of Rick Mercer on Canoe.tv?
Once again: Youtube has awful quality. CBC should go with Blip.tv (they offer ads too!)
Oh ya terrific. Meanwhile my digi cable provider doesn’t even offer the CBC news programs I WORK on in my region.
CBC’ers are so caught up with the quality issue – trust me, young people today really don’t care one iota about the quality – as long as it’s fast, and easily available – they go to Youtube, nobody’s even heard of blip.tv…
Posting CBC content on Canoe.tv makes as much sense as if Radio-Canada started making its content available on Canada.com or CTV.ca. :-S
Youtube’s pondering a quality improvement anyway, they still have all their hosted videos in the original resolution so it would apply retroactively (for those that weren’t crap to begin with).
This latest decision – words can express how I feel but I’d have to call people names and insult their intelligence and general fitness to work within 50 yards of a network so I’ll stick with *sob*.
SunTV and its predecessor Toronto1 have been ratings failures. The new owner Quebecor is desperately trying anything that might work. Using the Sun newspaper brand for the faltering local Toronto t.v. station was the first strategy. Now they’re trying to play up their internet prowess by creating online TV stations. When Quebecor bought Toronto1 it promised all sorts of high tech interactive, cutting edge, audience generated content– blah, blah, blah. Shareholders may be gullible enough to eat up such techno-drivel. But audiences knew better and realized the nightly Canoe Live program was a painful collection of badly shot video and boring content. Now it seems Quebecor is trying to establish a stronger presence on the internet. If viewers weren’t going to watch recycled CBC shows on a second rate t.v. station, why would they enjoy it on their desktop?
I think making CBC content available on other distribution platforms is a great move. This is the internet – that ultimate network of connections and referrals. Being proprietary with your content is a risk of being invisible. One of the hardest things to do right now is get people to consistently come to your site, so it’s a good strategy to get your content in as many faces as possible, as long as the right business deal is in place.
Be strategic, make sure the content promotes your own site, and make sure you build that site to be an amazing experience.
And knowing Bob, he took care of the business part just fine.
Not to mention that it speaks volumes that Canoe.tv needs even long-tail CBC content.
Canoe.tv is not another distribution platform, it’s a tentacle of a direct competitor. I can guarantee you that the other websites doing the same kind of thing as CBC.ca aren’t coming out with sparkly-eyed statements about connections, referrals, or the right business deal, they’re plotting and scheming to take as much of our share of the limited resource that is Canadian attention as they can.
What if Canoe.tv actually worked out, and that long-tail content that you so derisively refer to was enough to get them through their initial growing pains (not likely, I’ll admit). All that will have done is divert people from whatever amazing experiences you’ve created in the meantime.
And if (as is more likely), it does tank, how does it help the CBC to have its content associated with a failed site?
So they’re going to take our share of audience attention by helping people watch our content?
Should this stop us from doing deals with iTunes, because people would be exposed to music or other shows?
What I see is an attempt to make revenue, and an attempt to get content out there that points back to it’s originating source.
I think of the CBC as a content company, and this is a way to get the (some) content seen and get paid for it. If you want to get into tentacles of ownership, we’d be pulling our signal off Bell ExpressVu next.
Hey, look: Radio 3 TV is on http://cbcradio3.blip.tv/ !!!
iTunes is a distribution platform, as is Youtube (as is cable and satellite) and I’m all for getting CBC content up there, but Canoe.tv is obviously not. It’s the online video arm of a competing TV network. There may be the potential for some short-term revenue from selling CBC shows to it, but in the medium- to long-term, it helps a competitor. It is their site, it’s branded as such, and if it succeeds, even if partly on the back of CBC content, it builds their brand and not the CBC’s.
As for pointing back to the originating source, that raises an relatively interesting question: is a single link for all clips pointing to /television really the best that could be done in terms of linking back to the CBC? That page is a design iteration or two behind, and could do with either a revamp or retirement. Wouldn’t a link to the appropriate portal page for each clip (/entertainment or /news for the most part) be better, and more in line with the vision of the CBC as a content company?
the Radio 3 videos are the same ones available on youtube.
really, I’m not sure about them. They’re jokey videos, not always well done, and not so central to the mandate of the service.
I don’t object to them. But I wonder if perhaps there’s just too many staff there if they have the resources to put out this very peripheral stuff.
“As for pointing back to the originating source, that raises an relatively interesting question: is a single link for all clips pointing to /television really the best that could be done in terms of linking back to the CBC? That page is a design iteration or two behind, and could do with either a revamp or retirement. Wouldn’t a link to the appropriate portal page for each clip (/entertainment or /news for the most part) be better, and more in line with the vision of the CBC as a content company?”
I’m totally with you there. If the idea was to make some money and use their channel to promote our content and bring it back to cbc.ca, a general CBC bug is not going to accomplish the task. I’m all for subverting distribution channels – stealing clicks is what viral video is all about.
As for aiding & abetting the enemy, it’s an interesting discussion. You could argue that youtube is a competitor of ours as well – I know many people who type that in as soon as they sit down to a computer, and we sure aren’t getting100% of the revenue. But we’re probably reaching more people, including many who would never come to cbc.ca in the first place. I guess I feel that CBC and cbc.ca should be the full experience of what we do as an organization every day, and all of these deals are essentially examples or samplers.
In the broadest possible sense, every single website from google.com to geriatricssitonyourface.com is indeed our competitor. But Canoe offers a similar product (to use an even dirtier word than ‘content’), and targets the same market, as CBC.ca, and that makes them not a general competitor, but a direct one. If someone watches a CBC video on Youtube, this will either cause them to click through to CBC.ca or it won’t, but they’re almost certainly not going to go to canada.com or Canoe because of it. If they watch a Mansbridge One On One interview on Canoe.tv, they might go to CBC.ca, or they might click through one of the dozens of links on the page to Canoe. If they go to Canoe, they might very well start using it as their source for the two sites’ shared product (though obviously the CBC’s version is better). That’s what I see as the medium-to-long term danger of this kind of deal.
Also, the CBC has a lot more control over, and can derive a lot more benefit (albeit maybe not financial) from a clip on Youtube. At the most basic level the More Info panel is completely under the uploader’s control, and there’s the possibility of audience feedback and dialogue (beyond a simple rating system). None of this looks to be true for Canoe.TV. Even the link back to CBC.ca is presented as simply ‘CBC Television’, and is immediately followed by a Canoe link, ‘Check our programming guide…” that is more likely to be perceived as a link and followed by virtue of its phrasing. Canoe.tv is not designed to encourage the user to leave Canoe’s sites or highlight anything other than Canoe properties (if it did either, it would be bad design on their part). Of course, Youtube is probably stickier, but not through the obfuscation of external links.
“If they go to Canoe, they might very well start using it as their source for the two sites’ shared product (though obviously the CBC’s version is better). That’s what I see as the medium-to-long term danger of this kind of deal.”
Yup – that is the main risk of this particular deal.
Short term, if people are on canoe.tv already, cbc.ca isn’t losing any traffic. If CBC does a better job of promoting where people can go to find more, it may attract some traffic we would not normally receive. I’d love to see all CBC syndicated content have a very strong brand and call to action if it’s going to place it anywhere – that’s ultimately what made youtube emerge. It also provides even a small bit of benefit from pirating.
You mention the part about our version obviously being better. Do you think that this is what makes CBC different? And can we credit audiences with knowing the difference? Or do you think that people are fairly set in their patterns, or seek just a single source for content? I’m probably far from normal, but when I find something cool on youtube or wherever and it’s got a url on it, I tend to go there to check out what else they have.
BTW, what would stop anyone, including a competitor, from embedding a CBC youtube clip on its’ site?
Ted,
See the EFF’s page on embedding YouYube links:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/07/youtube-embedding-and-copyright
(In the US anyway) this is perfectly legal if the uploaded content on YouTube has been uploaded by the copyright owner. This is the case with CBC, so anyone could embed a CBC YouTube video on their page if they wanted. (YouTube servers are in the US)
BTW, what would stop anyone, including a competitor, from embedding a CBC youtube clip on its’ site?
Nothing, so why not cut out the middleman and send them a high-quality version they can use themselves? Maybe they’ll be nice and link back! Or send us some money. Or
something.
I suppose that “content company” means that CBC should focus more on getting it’s ‘content’ into as many distribution channels as possible without being picky about what those channels are.
Is that correct?
“I suppose that “content company” means that CBC should focus more on getting it’s ‘content’ into as many distribution channels as possible without being picky about what those channels are.
Is that correct?”
If that’s directed @ me, I clearly put in the word “some,” and pointed to the right business deal.