Under the Hood: Streaming Around the World
UPDATE: Just to reiterate (to help clarify some of the comments), CBC does not use any DRM.
CBC.ca offers over 25 different radio stations online for any internet user to listen to.
Being able to deliver so many stations to such a wide audience has many
challenges.
Step 1: Getting the Content
Because of the way the CBC Radio network is set up, not all of the Radio One and Radio Two feeds flow through Toronto. In order to get around that problem we use the CBC wide area network (the network that attaches all of the offices together) to get our encoded data back to the streaming server in Toronto.
The encoder is a rack mounted machine located in the Radio Central Equipment Room in each region. Some regions however (like the northern ones) is available via satellite back in Toronto. In those cases, we just keep the encoder in Toronto.
Step 2: Encoding the Content
All of the Radio streams are encoded in windows media format using Windows Media Encoder in each region. Each encoder encodes two streams, a high bitrate (32kb/s) and a low bitrate (16kb/s).
Windows media was chosen for several reasons:
- Rights Management. Unlike with the MP3 or Ogg format, Windows Media allows us to apply digital rights management rules to our live streams. Although no such rules currently exist, it does leave the possibility open in the future.
- Robustness. The streams are delivered using RTSP or MMS. Two protocols that were designed to deliver real time data. Using RTSP/MMS over HTTP (which is how MP3s are delivered) also allows us that extra layer of “protection” against users who want to steal our content. It’s harder to rip data delivered over RTSP/MMS than it is over HTTP (however, still possible).
- Scalability. Being a news organization, CBC.ca experiences huge spikes in bandwidth and demand when there is breaking news. Using windows media and windows media server allows to to meet that demand. I’ll explain how shortly.
- Support. CBC has a mandate(http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/B-9.01/) to “be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means..”. The majority of computer users in Canada use Windows and are able to support playing Windows Media streams. Using a format that allowed a user to listen to CBC Radio online without having to download a 3rd party application (Real Player, Winamp, iTunes) fulfilled our mandate.
Step 3: Delivering the Content
All of the servers that run CBC.ca are located in Toronto. This is where
all of the encoded streams are delivered to.
CBC.ca peers with an Internet exchange called TorIX(http://www.torix.net/). An Internet Exchange (IX) allows ISPs to pass traffic between one another for free. If a user is on TorIX (that is, they use an ISP that CBC peers with at TorIX) then all of the traffic for the radio stream will come from CBC.ca servers in Toronto.
On the other hand, if a user is not on TorIX, then they will be directed to servers located elsewhere. If all of CBC.ca’s servers are full (because of a high demand) users will then be directed to the Akamai(http://www.akamai.net) network to get the stream.
Akamai is a Content Distribution Network(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Distribution_Network) that CBC.ca uses to deliver content to end users in the most efficient means possible.
All of this is possible by software that was developed in house. It allows us to provide it with business rules (an example rule would be: only send users to server B when they are on TorIX and Server C and D are full) to ensure that the end user gets the best experience for the lowest cost to CBC.ca.
When you request a streaming asx file. The software does its magic and then rewrites the contents of that asx file on the fly. Your player then reads the asx file and fetches the content from the server.
This software was so successful that myself plus others who worked on it received a CBC.ca Award of Excellence(http://intranet/awards/online/awardsofexcellence/2004.htm) in 2004.
UPDATE: Just to reiterate (to help clarify some of the comments), CBC does not use any DRM.
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For the people who work on CBC.CA and keep the website and other services (such as streaming of audio) going, I first want to say that overall I think you do great work. Aside from the website’s change in format (which – I still much prefer the old format. I could actually find what I was looking for on the old format and rarely have to use the search feature. On the new site, I find it difficult to find things), my biggest complaint is the streaming windows media.
I am a Canadian by birth. For a lot of my computer use, I use eComStation instead of Windows. True, I do have a copy of Windows installed on my computer, but it is not my operating system of choice. eComStation can deal with most streaming media formats – MP3, OGG, MPEG, it can even handle stuff up to Flash 7. But it does not cooperate well with Windows Media. There is a player that can handle *some* windows media stuff, but it doesn’t do it very well and has a habit of crashing while doing so. So as a Canadian trying to listen to CBC online, the choice of Windows Media (with the exception of the OGG stream of the Toronto Radio One broadcast) limits me on how I use my computer (essentially ensuring that I have to be using the Windows partition).
To go down your list of “why windows media was chosen”, here’s my reply:
1. Rights management. The fact is, it is possible to grab just about any audio stream off the internet. On my sound card I can happily tell it to capture the WAV stream and record it into any decent sound application – such as the open source Audacity. I can then save it to any file format I want – OGG, MP3, whatever. I also have the option of capturing to the record channel anything which is currently playing on my computer’s speakers. This isn’t a highly sophistocated sound card either – it is a $25 Soundblaster Live 5.1 card. Recording can happen regardless of digital rights stuff. In fact I’ve used this capability to capture programming on CBC Radio that I happen to miss, and want to listen to it on my own time.
The second point is, as long as you’re allowing people to hear the audio on their computer, regardless of any digital rights stuff, it’ll be possible to record it. Ever hooked a plain old casette (or Minidisc) recorder up to the sound output on your computer? I have. It works.
2. Robustness and ripping data. Both MP3 and OGG streaming have proven to be robust For worrying about “ripping” data, see the previous note.
3. Scalability / delivering content. By your own admission, “this is possible by software that was developed in house.” If you developed the software in-house, then a questions come to mind. Why couldn’t the software that was developed be developed to work independently of the protocol and streaming format being used? Sure enough, directing internet traffic to servers where the load is least is a great idea. But such software shouldn’t necessairly be tied to a single protocol or media format.
Take for example your plain old web server. It can deliver content over the HTTP protocol. It doesn’t care what the *format* of that content is – it can be an HTML page, a JPG, GIF, PNG file, a PDF file, an MP3 or MPG or any other kind of file. It can also recognize various file formats, so a PHP file it will know to run through PHP first, and then just send the output across the ‘net. It doesn’t only work for one particular file format.
So is it true that the software that was developed to help spread the load on CBC.CA’s servers can *only work* with one streaming media format?
4. Support. I’ve pretty much already covered this earlier, but the reality is that not all Canadians use the same operating system. Sure, there are a lot of Windows users out there, but there are also Mac users, Linux users, BSD users, eComStation users, I even know a few Amiga users, the list goes on. To me it makes more sense to support a format which plays nice with just about all the platforms out there.
Oops, I hit “submit” too quick there before getting my last paragraph in. Anyways, I guess my overall piont is that I’d prefer to see CBC.CA streaming its stuff in something that would be a little more useable to me. That’s not to say that I don’t think the folks running CBC.CA aren’t doing a good job – on the contrary – I love the site and visit it every day. But the choice of Windows Media for streaming audio really annoys me, and the reasons that I’ve seen so far don’t seem to make a lot of sense to me.
I’m with Lorn, except I’d go with MP3 just because it’s widespread and I don’t see OGG Vorbis working easily for novices.
Oh, and as for CBC’s Mandate to “be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means..” I’d love to complain about that when it comes to signal strength in certain areas of Canada, but that’s slighly off topic
I’m really glad you brought this up. I agree with the previous comments. I was really ticked off when the CBC switched over; as a government funded station, it should be universally accessible. You say that, “Using a format that allowed a user to listen to CBC Radio online without having to download a 3rd party application (Real Player, Winamp, iTunes) fulfilled our mandate.” but this is untrue. MP3 is much more supported than Windows Media. (name a music player without MP3 support) As a Mac user I’d like to easily be able to listen in iTunes. There are the Toronto stations available in OGG, but I think a more universal format like MP3 should be available for all the streams.
One good reason for using OGG Vorbis is that it is an open file format, meaning the algorithms that write/read the audio is free of patents and available for the public. With an open format, anyone can “tinker” and make the audio more useful. If a new non-Windows system is developed, anyone is free to write a new program that handles the OGG Vorbis format.
Windows Media, while it might be supported by the majority of systems that Canadians own (today), is a proprietary format that Microsoft can choose to stop supporting at any time. And, they are likely not willing to share the algorithm that makes Windows Media happen, so anyone with a non-Windows system is out of luck.
Tim Bray talks about the benefits of open formats, in this case the Open Document Format here. Many of the point he makes apply to audio files/streams as well.
And… don’t forget the patent issues with the MP3 format. There might be lock-in there too.
I should preface this by saying I think CBC generally does a fabulous job with its Internet work, and especially the recent launch of podcasts. Like the others in this thread, I’m griping about the choice of Windows Media for streaming, pointing it out as an individual bad choice in a sea of good ones.
The Windows Media format has some technical advantages, but it is not the best choice for a variety of reasons, most significantly in that it is entirely proprietary to a single company, and that is not what the CBC should be supporting. I didn’t like the previous Real streaming either for the same reason.
Since Microsoft is no longer updating or even offering the Windows Media Player application for Macs, and the Flip4Mac plugin they recommend instead doesn’t work very well, CBC’s streams are becoming LESS usable for me over time as a Mac user. Certainly anyone using a portable device (say, an Internet-capable cell phone) is even less likely to be able to play streaming WMA files.
The ideal would be an open and royalty-free format like Ogg Vorbis, but too few people can play it reliably, even though there are only political, and not technological, reasons that Windows and the Mac OS can’t play it natively. MP3 would be a better choice, even though Fraunhofer does require an encoding royalty, simply because essentially anyone with sound on their computer or player can hear it.
Right now there is a significant, and likely growing, audience for CBC streams that cannot easily use the format you have chosen. On my new Intel Mac, I have to stick with over-the-air broadcasts or podcasts, so you may as well not be doing it at all as far as my listening abilities are concerned.
More importantly, the principle of open formats should be a key one. I understand there is a big investment here, so I would suggest that whenever the lifecycle of the current solution is over, and the search begins for its replacement, that a more widely supported format be a key element of that process.
In the meantime, thanks for streaming.
All of the comments so far are excellent. However they all fail to address the fact that the format that we need to stream the radio in has to meet all FOUR of the requirements I listed earlier.
Rights Management
Scalability
Robustness
Support
Windows Media is able to fit in all four. If MP3 had a DRM model and was able to be streamed using RTSP and our CDN supported the format then I’m positive we would be streaming in that format instead.
We did take a serious look at mp3. onecog2many reminded me of a problem we had with using mp3 as a format as well – Licensing. It was unclear at the time if CBC would have to pay any license fees to use the format. With Windows Media it was simple to understand any licensing requirements.
I would also like to add some more details about our “in house load balancing” software that was written. This software can be used regardless for the format, whether it be OGG, MP3 or Windows Media format. It simply rewrites meta files (asx, m3u, etc..) on the fly.
One final note has to deal with sound quality. In tandem with the “support” requirement we couldn’t leave dial up users in the dark. So all of the streams were being encoded with modem friendly bit rates. MP3 at that bit rate (16kbit/s) is inferior to Windows Media. MP3 was designed to encode music at higher bit rates. Windows Media Audio 9 (the codec we are using) is able to encode Radio One (which is mainly talk) with a much better quality at a lower bit rate than MP3. This allows us to squeeze more listeners through the bandwidth pipe at a lower cost.
If a “majority” of people use Windows, then why not shut down the Web site and publish everything as Microsoft Word files?
CBC continues to betray complete ignorance of the concept of interoperability. Plus you have placed on the record the fact that digital rights management swayed CBC in its decision-making. Who’s really making those decisions, a *public* broadcaster or an ancien-régime cartel like CRIA?
Blake,
With all due respect to your reply, I think you may have missed the point that I tried to make in my first comment with regards to digital rights management.
The main reason that digital rights management stuff exists is to control what people can do with content – in the case of live streaming – whether it can be saved to a hard disk for listening at a future time, whether people can dump it to their iPods (or other portable media players), questions like that.
And as I attempted to point out, all of the digital rights stuff is easy to circumvent on any computer. Anyone with a cheap $25 sound card (pretty much every computer sold since about 1996 has a sound card) and some open sourced audio software can record streaming content to their computer and then convert it into just about any other audio format, even formats which don’t recognize digital rights stuff. In my opinion the only thing which Digital Rights Management in Windows Media when used with audio streaming does is make it extremely difficult for people to hear the audio on any computer platform other then MS Windows. And by your own admission, CBC.CA currently isn’t using DRM on its audio streams.
So with that in consideration, I’m not sure why there is such an importance placed on the ability to use DRM on the live streaming should CBC chose to do so. Or is this maybe something that management wants there, not fully understanding how easily it is to bypass? Certainly I’d hope that CBC radio management would recognize how easy it is to record audio for later playback (they do work in radio after all!). To think about it in another way, we’ve had the ability to record live CBC radio broadcasts ever since the tape recorder was invented. Is there concern within CBC about all those people out there who have casette recorders attached to their radios (and come to think of it, this probably gives a better sound quality then the online stream)?
As for the other points, I still would suggest that both MP3 and OGG have proven they can be up to the challenge. Sites such as Live365 and the Shoutcast directory has shown that these formats can scale well, are robust, and as for support, millions of internet users have been able to figure out how to listen to streams without difficulty.
I know, I’m probably pointing out things which have already been discussed and decided on within CBC. But hey, Blogs and comments on blogs are all about opinions, so I just thought I’d chime in with mine.
Lorne,
I agree that it’s possible to circumvent nearly all DRM. Anyone with the right skills can record the stream of CBC Radio online.
But that doesn’t mean that just because it’s possible to circumvent DRM that we should eliminate it entirely. To do so would put the CBC on the painful side of a lawsuit from the various rights-holders (notably, the owners of music).
As of today, the CBC has the rights to broadcast rights-held music over the air (terrestrial transmitters) and via live streaming. And that’s it. We’re simply not permitted to make commercial music available for Internet download and unprotected.
So yes, someone could if they wanted to, find and download the right software, install the audio drivers, resolve driver conflicts, and set up the recording schedule. And to people like you and me, that’s not particularly difficult. But most people simply don’t have the skills or the time/inclination to do all that. (The download links at sourceforge.com are confusing enough to the average computer user. Which one do I download? Why are there 15 servers listed? Do I need to get the software from each of them? These sound like silly questions to you and I, but, again, the average Canadian — think your mom — would just give up.)
Tod, I’m sure you know about DRM. It just doesn’t work when technical people want to circumvent it. It just annoys your mom who wants to listen to the CBC on her iMac!
There appears to be no justification for DRM; indeed the notion is contrary to that of a public broadcaster. There is no legal requirement for it. The term ‘stealing our content’ is also inappropriate; as a Canadian taxpayer I own CBC’s content along with 30 million others. Even in the case of streaming licensed material, everyone knows that copying is not stealing (check the dictionary; stealing includes depriving the rightful owner of his property), that home taping of broadcasts is perfectly legal, as is private copying thereafter. Legal mechanisms already exist to pursue actual copyright infringement: why presume all listeners are criminals? Sadly, the CBC has missed a real opportunity to lead the way. Rejecting DRM and embracing open formats would be the stance consistent with a public broadcaster charged with serving its owner/audience. I suggest the award of excellence be passed on to the Brazilians who truly deseve it. It may be quicker to learn Portuguese than to wait for the CBC to get with the program.
Lorne,
You are absolutely right.
I think that everyone is hung up on the fact that WMA is not an open format with DRM and don’t see the other reasons why we chose WMA.
The most important in my mind has to do with scalability. We need to be able to serve large spikes in demand at any time. WMA allows us to do that in cooperation with Akamai. There is no enterprise solution for a CDN that supports mp3 live streaming (we’ve looked). If Monday morning 40,000 people decided to listen to a stream because of breaking news.. We can deliver that.
Which would you rather have?
Open format and limited scalability
or
Windows media and guaranteed to listen to the news when you need it.
First, this post from Michael Geist is very much worth reading:
http://tinyurl.com/m6k6n
To that, I’ll add this: If you truly believe that users will want to pirate 32kbps data streams, you’re deluding yourselves. DRM on such a low-bitrate stream is little more than a formality to appease record labels that don’t understand the nature of digital content. In any case, it’s trivial to grab the stream, DRMed or not.
How much easier is it to grab an MP3 stream? Let me describe the steps necessary to record a Windows Media stream:
1. Open Volume Control; set recording source to Wave Out Mix.
2. Click Start > Programs > Accessories > Entertainment > Sound Recorder.
3. Click record button.
Compare effort to grab an MP3 stream:
1. Open playlist file in text editor.
2. Find stream URL; copy to clipboard.
3. Paste in browser; press enter.
How many moms do you really think could do either of those? Besides, why are you worrying about moms pirating your streams? Seriously!
Finally, I’ll ask this: Why is it OK to lock out a significant portion of your listeners who are not using Microsoft’s proprietary platform when your mandate is to “be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means”? Imagine if the CBC web site were IE only; this is essentially the audio equivalent.
Overall, I think you guys are doing a very good job, but I’m not at all impressed with this decision.
Hi Chris, Thanks for your comment — I agree with a lot of what you say. But let me add some background to your comment
> as a Canadian taxpayer I own CBC’s content along with 30 million others.
Two things here.
1. You’re right. As a Canadian, you own the content that CBC produces. But a lot of what we play we don’t produce or own. We licence that content. This is an important distinction that I think is getting lost in the discussion here. For instance, the CBC doesn’t own "Thriller" by Michael Jackson. The reason we can use it is that we’ve reached an agreement with the song’s owners and performer to play it on air and make it available for live streaming. But that’s it. This is why there’s not much music in our podcasts, for instance. I’m pretty sure that the CBC doesn’t own Vinyl Cafe. We only licence its use. So yes, as a taxpayer, you own a lot of CBC content. But you licence the rest.
2. On the topic of giving away for free, it’s a nice-sounding solution. But, since you pay for roughly 2/3rds of the CBC (television advertising makes up the rest) let me ask you to make the decision that we (CBC) are faced with.
Take the extremely popular radio show Ideas, for instance. We sell episodes of Ideas on CD. We make pretty good money doing it too. That money goes directly back to programming. Yes, we could GIVE away the show (every episode via podcast, for instance), but we would lose that revenue. So what? It would mean you would have to decide: Less programming or higher taxes? So, which would you prefer — raise money with popular programs, drop some programming, start putting ads on CBC Radio One, or pay more in taxes? Those really are our only options.
Anyway… I don’t *mean* to have the last word here,
but I’m off camping on holidays now so I won’t be able to approve new comments. Feel free to post and I’ll approve them if I can along the way, but for sure on Aug 8.
I used to listen frequently until the change to Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. Pretty lame thing to do because I usually find CBC to be quite informed about these things.
If you are worried about litigation from artists just inform them that they will not get air time on a public radio station unless they agree to DRM free. The Michael Geist post about this issue is really good.
http://tinyurl.com/m6k6n
BTW I really appriciate the availability of a comments section on this issue.
-> Most people don’t have the time and inclination to rip an MP3 stream. By your own standard MP3 is good enough to do what you need. Anyone who is able to save an MP3 stream is able to save an wma stream just as easily.
-> I don’t quite understand how MP3 streaming is not live streaming. Re-reading your post (Tod) I think you misunderstand that what people are asking for is MP3 *streaming* and not to download an MP3 file. Same difference as .wma stream and .wma file. And if you are not permitted to stream without DRM what are you doing now? You said you aren’t currently using the DRM functionality of wma. You seem to be doing just fine without DRM. In fact, everyone has been doing fine with regular radio for years which is just as easy to copy.
-> Windows media is far, far less accessible than MP3. It is available on fewer computing platforms (Mac support appears to be weak, essentially unavailable on anything else besides Windows) and far fewer devices. People are increasingly listening to internet radio away from their computers and on streaming appliances which do not universally support wma. MP3 is always provided as base functionality and OGG is free to implement. Any additional formats increases the cost of the device to the manufacturer (and consumer) and requires the permission/blessing of (e.g. Microsoft) which may be difficult to aquire for competitive or technical reasons.
-> Surely part of your mandate is to make the CBC as accessible as possible to Canadians? Majority of users is not good enough when a better alternative exists. Windows media clearly does not meet the “most appropriate and efficent” test.
-> Nearly everyone would be satisfied with 16 Kb/s as the low-end streaming option in terms of quality. If you need better quality then you can look at AAC or OGG.
-> ‘Stealing’ our content? I was under the impression that the private copying exemption specifically allowed me to make such audio copies. *Copying audio for personal use is neither unethical nor illegal*. Stop perpetuating this fallacy.
To recap:
- wma does not provide any substantiative protection against copying. MP3 streaming offers qualitatively equivalent deterrence.
- MP3 streaming is not the same as downloading an MP3 file.
- Private audio copying is expressly permitted by Canadian law. You appear to have a ‘broadcasting’ license for streaming audio which I assume is not contigent on DRM. I do not see the legal dilemma.
- wma is far less accessible than MP3 and OGG (the latter due to its freeness/openess).
- The case for Windows media is meritless.
I was really excited about where the CBC was going. I really thought you guys “Got it”.
Just a correction to my comment above: entering the stream URL in your browser won’t let you save it after all. You’ll have to get something like Streamripper in order to do that – but there’s no need to worry about that, because it’s a Sourceforge project and it’s far too confusing for the average Canadian!
My point is simply that you have no more reason to worry about moms stealing MP3 streams than WMA streams.
…and a few other things that I failed to mention above:
* The current Windows Media streams aren’t currently protected, so clearly you’re not legally obligated to use DRM. Furthermore, it seems that the content owners have no problem with the current unprotected setup, so why even consider using DRM?
* Suppose that you did implement DRM on your streams at some point in the future. As far as I know, it is not possible to play DRMed WMA on any platform other than Windows. (As in, completely impossible, even for geeks.) Would this really be acceptable for you? Suppose I can’t afford a Windows license. Does this not worry you at all?
* I can see the issue with scalability, but it would be quite possible for you to offer MP3 streams alongside the Windows Media ones. If the demand becomes too high, just temporarily disable the MP3 stream. It may not be ideal, but at least it means that those who are not using Microsoft’s software can listen. (Also, am I the only one who’s concerned about your reliance on an American company to distribute your content? Would you also consider relying on an American company for your radio and television broadcasts?)
Excuse me, but:
“Using a format that allowed a user to listen to CBC Radio online without having to download a 3rd party application (Real Player, Winamp, iTunes) fulfilled our mandate.”
Here’s a hint: Windows Media Player can play MP3s as well. As far as Universal Audio Codecs go MP3 is THE solution there is not ONE audio player out there (that I am aware of) that cannot play MP3 out of the box.
On the other hand me being on a Mac and Unix (Solaris & Linux) I have a hell of time getting WMA to work properly.
If you really want to make it “easily accessible” switch to MP3.
When it comes to DRM, well, just don’t do it for once, but there are DRM wrappers availalbe for MP3 as well.
There is an inherent contradiction here which must be resolved here, and your cursory rejection of it is disconcerting.
> You’re right. As a Canadian, you own the content that CBC produces.
Alright, so I should have access to this content. This is backed up by the CBC’s mandate that:
> [content must be] made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means..
But here I am, unable to access any of this content on any of the four computers I own. Why?
From my perspective, it looks like the CBC is restricting playback to only a certain brand of radio in order to satisfy over-zealous foreign-industry demands. My “radio” is not approved for playback of CBC content, even though I pay taxes to have this content produced. As others have pointed out, not even the “approved radio” prevents the copying content, which makes this situation even more ridiculous.
Big Content always talk about *their* rights as the “copyright owners,” but they forget that copyright is a legal device meant to inspire new content to be produced for the public domain, and not an infinite-term money making machine, producing royalties for many generations after the original author has died. I am deeply saddened to see that this mentality is penetrating even public broadcasters like the CBC.
The government (and thus the CBC) is supposed to be representing the **people** of Canada, and not these foreign industries. As a citizen, I am rightfully angry that my government willfully ignores its mandate and hoists upon us oppressive foreign copyright terms and mechanical restrictions (DRM), even with content produced with the money I pay in taxes.
i’m appalled that the CBC would choose to only support windows. yes, the majority of canadians are using windows… but when was canada about supporting ONLY the majority? i think that this goes totally against the spirit of the CBC and the spirit of what it is to be canadian.
it’s a sad day indeed.
I am a tax payer and a user of the CBC.
Here is your mandate from me: use mp3.
Michael Geist’s comments noted above are well worth the read. I don’t understand the objection on monetary grounds. You ARE giving the shows away for free, aren’t you? I don’t have to pay to listen to CBC, so I can listen to the show for free, it seems to me. And if I want, I can capture your stream and save it and listen to it (in crappy audio) again any time I like, just like I can tape it off the radio and listen to it again any time I like.
The scalability objection likewise has to be considered weak. My company is using Akamai to stream media and we didn’t choose WMA files. I wasn’t privy to the decision-making but certainly there are options besides WMA.
It’s disappointing to see our PUBLIC broadcaster taking such a weak stance on the issue of open and accessible content. CBC should be doing better.
Tod,
There are many other responses to the funding question you pose. Ideas recordings could be made freely downloadable after an embargo period of 1-5 years. This would allow you to preserve most of the revenue from sales of recordings while still allowing the public access to over twenty years of quality broadcasting. That’s just one example, off the top of my head.
How much benefit would the Canadian public receive from the ability to browse through and listen to an extensive back catalogue of Ideas programs, free of charge? How much money is CBC raising from CD sales by denying that benefit to the public, and what programming are they purchasing with the money? How much would you have to raise the average taxpayer’s bill in order to write the whole thing off?
I imagine sales of Ideas recordings provide a portion of “Miscellaneous Revenues”, reported in the CBC 2004-2005 Annual Report as between $73 million and $80 million. Even if CBC made nothing by leasing space or selling off surplus equipment, that’d be less than $3 raised per Canadian citizen per year by holding on to Ideas instead of making it available for free. I’d bet the real figure is a lot lower, which makes this policy look a lot stingier.
Without knowing what’s being bought with the money from Ideas sales, I can’t tell you whether it’s a good trade-off for locking that content up. On the face of it, I think I’m getting the short end of the stick.
hi all
i am not an employee of the CBC, but i do do some freelance work. hope its ok that i am commenting here.
i got to this post through michael geist’s site. i am a musician in toronto, involved in the world music scene. i am absolutely for all kinds of openness on the internet, including getting rid of DRM. the decision to use windows media player is not a good one (despite the ease of getting around it should you decide to do so—what mom doesn’t have a son or daughter to help them archive broadcasts?), and while i appreciate the licensing limits that the CBC must conform to to broadcast much of the music, that doesn’t mean that we can’t change what we broadcast.
as an artist, i have noooooooo problem with people downloading my music. it is obvious to me that people who really support music will continue to do so, and those that won’t, won’t. i may turn on someone who hadn’t heard one of my bands before. who knows? but to use the argument:
Less programming or higher taxes
is really alarmist and reactionary, however you want to couch it in reasoned debate. there are other options:
changing programming
working to make sold content more attractive (playing a file is not the same as having a CD)
….i’m sure there are others, i’m only a drummer after all, not a policy analyst.
the CBC is ours. we can do what we want with it. from my vantage point, there are a lot of commendable efforts and initiatives going on right now, and the face of CBC radio is changing for the better. i understand that these things take time, i am just letting you know that it is important to keep at it.
As for scalability, look at the last fedral election where CBC.ca’s scalability failed miserably for myself and a few others I know. It took me over half an hour and a few attempts to get a good connection, and then it got dropped a couple times. My brother in Vancouver (I’m in Waterloo) had the same problems… though he was never able to maintain a connection.
A few points.
1. CBC Radio’s podcasts are released as MP3 files. I take that to mean that the MP3 format meets your accessibility guidelines.
2. The MP3 format has NO restrictions on distribution or playback. When you purchase an MP3 encoder, Fraunhofer gets a royalty. This does not affect end-users, and is significantly less money than the Windows-branded solution.
3. There is a huge amount of freely-available streaming software that can broadcast MP3 audio on HTTP. Shoutcast and Icecast are two. They don’t do streaming over RTSP (which is based on HTTP anyway), but that says nothing about their “robustness”, or their ability to handle load. Shoutcast, for instance, allows an excellent cluster setup that can handle huge loads by spreading the broadcast over multiple servers.
4. Technically, RTSP is ‘heavier’ on the server side. RTSP operates on the idea that the user connects to the stream and then issues commands to the server, such as ‘play’ and ‘pause’. Because of this, you limit your capacity to serve users by using an RTSP solution. In contrast, in a stateless HTTP solution, users simply connect to the stream and hear what is playing – just like real radio. To stop playback they just disconnect; to pause, their player buffers the stream.
5. Pretty much any player out there can connect to an HTTP stream. Only a few can connect to MMS or RTSP stream, and most of those are commercial applications. Thus, MMS and RTSP seem to be detrimental to accessibility.
6. MP3 audio playback is supported by nearly every operating system or portable device in existence. Windows Media is not.
7. You don’t use DRM on any of your Windows Media streams. It is legal for me to tape a show off my TV for later viewing – why shouldn’t I be able to do the same for the CBC’s internet broadcasts? The medium doesn’t change the legalities of the problem.
DRM is an attempt to circumvent the consumer’s right to timeshift and record broadcast content. The CBC should not support or use technologies that trample on listeners’ rights.
I’m not saying Windows Media doesn’t do the job – just that there are technologies that are MORE accessible, MORE efficient, MORE flexible, LESS expensive, and LESS restrictive that could do the job just as well. I would expect a public broadcaster to use diverse open technologies to serve 100% of their audience – not expensive, proprietary, and limited commercial technologies with the capability to infringe on audience rights.
First of all, I agree with many of the comments here, where people are disappointed in the CBC decision to use WMA as the audio stream. Inarguably, it “locks out” most non-Windows users from hearing the CBC’s streaming content. I think that part of the problem here is that the criteria used for choosing a streaming format was fundamentally flawed. It should NOT be surprising that the conclusions drawn on suboptimal conditions dont produce a desired result. My objections with the criteria? read on…
1) DRM is not mandated by any law, and the CBC is a *public* service
2) The DRM is protecting a realtively low-quality stream, which in most cases would be unsuitable for illegal activity (such as copying and distribution)
3) The same material is broadcast without DRM, so why is the stream treated differently?
4) The idea that “Windows is the most common OS, so we’ll just use that” is quite short-sighted. Precisely what percentage of CBC web visitors do not use windows? Can I get a rebate on that part of my taxes?
5) IF a person knows how to access an audio stream, then downloading a third-person application (if even needed) is NOT a difficult task.
In spite of my disdain for this WMA solution, what I find even more interesting is that there is no positive feedback in this [admittedly] short list of comments. The comments appear to come from highly educated, articulate and concerned citizens – and yet very little “nice” has been said about this solution. In most cases, carefully worded attempts at constructive criticism have been made, to which which Mr. Crosby (no offense intended) has felt the need to defend the existing policy. Is it not in your interest to make interested listeners/readers happy?
Blake, I hope you will not take this the wrong way, but I think that this WMA decision fails a good percentage of Canadians. I have been an avid listener of the CBC for years, and cbc.ca has been my homepage for at least 5 years now. It strikes me that if you have the resources to put out a WMA-based audio stream, then also providing an alternate (non-windows accessible) stream should not be terribly difficult. By your own arguments, if I represent such a small subset of the population, it needn’t be as robust or scalable. Finally, without a legal mandate for DRM, the alternate solution need NOT be DRM compatible.
In the meantime, here’s hoping that a linux-compatible stream becomes available sometime in the near future.
-A
Blake
In response to your question:
> Which would you rather have?
> Open format and limited scalability
> or
> Windows media and guaranteed to listen to the news when you need it.
As someone who does not own or use Microsoft products (except at work). I use both Mac’s and Linux. And I am like a growing number of the population, especially as Apple’s market share continues to grow. And as Derek K. Miller said above Microsoft has decided to discontinue to support Windows Media Player on the mac in favour of Flie4Mac (which has limited support). So Windows Media does not offer a guaranteed option to listen to the news when I need to. Which leave the option of wanting the open format with limited scalability.
Just to reply to some questions that some users have had:
Adrian, the decision to go with WMA wasn’t mine alone. A number of factors such as cost, infrastructure, and policies all played a role in deciding which format to chose. A Linux compatible stream is available (in Ogg Vorbis) at http://www.cbc.ca/livemedia/cbcr1-toronto.m3u.
And you’re right, it’s not robust (the Radio 2 stream has been down for quite a while now) or scalable (when the max users are hit [which has yet to happen] there’s no increasing it).
The Ogg Vorbis streams were set up as a trial to see what kind of demand there would be. Unfortunately it only makes up of less that 1-2% of our streaming listeners. So as it stands right now, it’s not being expanded.
Of course it is in CBC’s interest to make their listeners/readers happy. The best way to communicate your unhappiness is to send an email to cbcinput@toronto.cbc.ca. The decision makers get a copy of all comments submitted to the website each week. It’s up to them to change the policy around streaming live radio. I will happily make those changes happen.
Shawn,
Your other option would be the Ogg Vorbis stream (see url above). However I have yet to find a plugin that works properly with quicktime/itunes
–
The majority of the comments have been on the topic of DRM. As noted, we currently do not use DRM. As well anyone can listen to these streams online (even people who don’t “pay” for CBC like non-Canadians living in other countries). DRM could be used to restrict this content (among other tools) to people who have “paid” for it (read: Canadians).
I wish I had given a little bit of history behind the live streaming radio in my original post. I”m sure that some of you remember that we used to do all of our streaming in Real format. We were facing some pretty steep licensing costs as well we were restricted in the number of concurrent listeners. Since we’ve moved to Windows Media we no longer have any licensing costs, the streams have been more stable, and there is no restriction on the number of people that can listen to a stream (we literally have Unlimited capacity thanks to Akamai).
Over the past five years that I’ve worked here. I’ve seen some tremendous improvements in regards to the live radio streaming infrastructure. I’m sure in the next five years they will only improve further.
You listed four criteria. There is a fifth one you aren’t listing:
us.
It’s not about what’s good for you, it’s about what’s good for us.
Play music that isn’t encumbered with DRM.
Although not ideal, an alternate mp3 or ogg stream for *any* content available via wma would be acceptable.
Less than 1-2% of Canadians use CBC streaming radio. I guess you should just scrap streaming radio altogther.
Artson: No streaming or content on CBC has DRM applied.
Blake:
Maybe the reason that only 1-2% of the streaming listeners are listening to the Vorbis stream is that:
It is only provided for one station in one market (Toronto, Radio 1). This severely limits the number of potential listeners.
It is provided only in 24kbit/s (The Windows Media gets 32 kbit/s. If you want to do streaming of Radio1 at 24kbit/s, it should really be done in Ogg Speex instead, which should be vastly better quality than the Windows Media at the same bit rate).
It’s actually hard for most people to find the Ogg Vorbis stream, even when it is pointed out to them that it exists. The Windows Media is front and center, the Vorbis stream is buried in a sidebox, then several more clicks, only to find out that of the 2 provided stations one is broken and the other is poorly supported.
So, yeah, it’s not really a surprise that only 1-2% of the streaming listeners are listening to the Ogg Vorbis stream. Your setup has almost doomed it to failure before it began. I’m amazed that it’s doing as well as it is.
I am old enough to be a grandfather, but learned programming back in high school in the mid sixties (I had a good school), and own ten computers with five different operating systems. I hate almost everything to do with Microsoft, and avoid using their products wherever possible. I also never liked Real Audio, with its intrusive policies, and have used The Real Alternative since it was introduced. I used to listen to the CBC fairly regularly on-line, but changes in routine meant that I have been listening mostly in my car and in my kitchen in the evenings for a while. Now that I have discovered that the Mother Corp has abandoned its earlier innovative efforts in favour of monopoly practices, I will have to rethink not only whether I will bother to re-establish an on-line connection, but whether I can in good conscience continue to listen even over the air. There is a world of alternatives out there, and a lot of contestation over the path of future developments. If CBC chooses wrong, I will not choose CBC.
Step back. Think. Why is this part of CBC doing this? Why would a public corporation impliment a propriatary system with a framework for DRM and then not use it?
The best answer I can come up with is Risk Management (at least for the DRM side). The person who was responsible for making the decision is afraid. Afraid of being responsible for a lawsuit. Let us suppose that a content provider (say Tragically Hip, or Sony Music Canada) decided to make an example of the CBC and sent a team of high powered expensive legal tacklers knocking. Prior to lawsuits being filed, lawsuits are threatened. This part of CBC has layed down a framework that they can use to “easily” implement DRM should the right pursuasion come knocking. Day Saved! Service continues. Heros, Champage, Risk mitigated.
Let us consider a more ballsey approach: Creative commons and Public Domain. If the provider does not want to allow you to broadcast then they can go elsewhere for national exposure. Presumably artists and content providers WANT you. You can get on without them, heck you make enough of your own content. The quality argument is what the freemarket is using to distinguish between free and for-pay content and I agree. You want pristine quality content buy the album.
My mind wanders, I consider alternatives: Real player (Check the BBC Site): Not an open solution but:
DRM yes, Linux yes, Mac Yes.
CBC what aren’t you telling us?