Strombo Timely With The Hour on YouTube
George Stroumboulopoulos has people stopping him to shake his hand in many American states because of The Hour’s popularity due to widespread viewing on YouTube.
The Canadian Press reports that The Hour has been getting millions of hits on YouTube since the show started uploading segments last fall. The Hour is also one of the top video podcasts in Canada on iTunes. Strombo says that the show has a wide appeal since it fills a gap in late-night TV; unlike other late-night shows, it isn’t pure comedy.
Viewers as far afield as New Zealand and Australia are also members of the shows’ Facebook group.
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Wow. Congrats Strombo. Canada’s newest export – hand flailing, smug, fake hipness.
Millions of hits and it amounts to absolutely nothing of social value.
Even less than Canadian Idol.
The artificial popularity of The Hour is a DUH moment in broadcasting, and George’s primary “skill” is taking interesting people and issues and making them seem DU-LL.
Here’s a guy who has practically taken over CBC television, as if he were a televangelist, with a daily broadcast of himself sitting across from celebrities. Add the support of workers from several unions, a budget, and providing the show for free on the internet, then maybe the result is not really much of an achievement or surprise.
I, on the other hand, without the benefit of George’s resources, have created videos and things on the internet by myself that have gotten hundreds of hits. That’s something George has yet to accomplish.
So when can we see The Hour on air in the USA? Not sure which network it would really fit with, but surely there is one out there somewhere.
I’d expect to see Strobo on AlJazeera. He’s pretty anti-American. He describes policies that he doesn’t like as “American-style”. That’s the CBC buzzword for “nazi-style”. We’re not allowed anything American-like in Canada – according to the CBC.
Actually, according to the sooper-sekrit CBC style guide, “American-style” can be used to refer to “with extra cheese”, “from behind with the lights out”, or “[when shooting a herd of ungulates] from a moving train”. I leave it as an exercise for the viewer to figure out which policy fits which category.
Mike, a little reminder of history: There was a time once when Canada’s existence was predicated on being “anti-American”. Heck, our country was designed to be the home of the first American Counter-Revolution. It hasn’t exactly worked out as the Family Compact and Compact Clique planned back in the 18th Century, but there are advantages to occasionally disagreeing with the US Government and that nation’s most influential business interests out in the open where the rest of the planet can see the disagreement happening. To the USA and to us…and sometimes the rest of the planet as well. We might want to leave well enough alone here.
That’s a heavily spun and extremely misleading article to say the least. If you look at their YouTube page you’ll see that The Hour has posted almost 300 video clips, many only a minute or two long, and most only have between 5 and 15 thousand views, even months after being posted. The few that have a large numbers of views are the ones that have titles that would come up on searches that have nothing to do with The Hour or CBC, like “Dominatrix”, and “Is Barbie based on a German sex doll?”. While it is true that here have been a few million views of clips from The Hour this number is reached by summing all of the views of all 300 different clips. There are only maybe 5 – 10 thousand regular individual viewers of the show on YouTube. The show has fewer than 4,000 subscribers, for example.
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=TheHour&p=r
The Hour also only has 1,400 fans on its Facebook page. Compare this to the CBC show JPod which had 3,000 members on its Facebook page after only a few episodes, and still has over 4,000 members in spite of being cancelled weeks ago. CBC Radio 3’s Facebook page has about 5,000 members.
Very few people are watching The Hour in Canada so why would people outside of Canada be interested in it? George is a nice person but he’s a middle aged man with very little education who has never lived outside of his small part of Canada for any significant length of time. In other words, he is a local yokel who has neither the education nor the worldly experience to enable him to conduct good interviews which are of interest to a national Canadian audience. The Hour is a very weak show that is not interesting or culturally relevant to the vast majority of young Canadians, and not surprisingly it draws very low audience numbers. The fact that George would be hired and then retained as host of a show like this is a very good example of the extent to which cronyism has taken over at the TBC, however.