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?

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.

Less than 1-2% of Canadians use CBC streaming radio. I guess you should just scrap streaming radio altogther.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

it’s a sad day indeed.

> 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.

“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.

…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?)

-> 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”.