Our canadian public broadcast engineers from CBC/SRC published in January the first issue of their new bi-annual Technology Review . As Ray Carnovale (VP and CTO) puts it in his editorial : This semi-annual electronic publication will give an opportunity for us at CBC/Radio-Canada to describe and promote the significance of our activities in the Technology group, and to share our ideas both inside and outside the Corporation. As a service group, our role is to bring our collective knowledge and expertise to enable the infrastructure for our media partners to create the highest quality programming for the Canadian public. I like the WEB/PDF format that we also enjoy from the very famous EBU Technical Review . I think it’s a great initiative and I’m looking forward to read about CBC’s views on the future of broadcasting…. or, well, broadcasting 2.0!
You are currently browsing the archive for the public broadcasting category.
The 40th Super Bowl is currently live on TV. Either through cable, satellite, IPTV or off air, it requires a capacity that we can’t have off the Net today. With its extremely high Nielsen ratings, it shows the best features of broadcasting: Live, high capacity bitstream, one-to-many-many-many. The broadcast infrastructure is at its best here. It’s currently the only channel that supports the dissimination of the head of the longtail live, in HD, to the largest audience of the year.
By the way, wikipedia provides a good description of the event. There could be as much as 100 millions viewers this year, mostly in the U.S. (1 billion is an urban legend) . As a comparison, there were 3.8 billion viewers of the 2000 olympic games in Sydney.
Well, now I have to leave you. Mick Jagger is singing his “I can’t get no satisfaction”. I’ll be one of 100 millions with you…
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will be holding a public hearing in May 2006. The notice underlines the fact that since the last policy review in 1998, we have seen many “dramatic” technological changes:
The seven years since the 1998 Policy came into effect have seen the advent of new digital technologies and methods of distribution that are having a profound effect on the way in which people, particularly young people, obtain and listen to music. This is presenting the radio industry with new opportunities, but also new challenges: in addition to the satellite radio services now available, file-sharing, podcasting, downloading, and audio streaming, all facilitated through the increasing ubiquity of the Internet, offer new and often more flexible alternatives to the traditional practices of purchasing recorded music and listening to radio broadcasting.
Radio has to be redifined. Even the term “radio” has no clear meaning within this new context. The former definition of radio is based on some specific networking technologies (AM, FM, …), value chains (advertising,…), formats (talk/music mix,…) and so on. A radio broadcaster today has three roles: operate the network, manage content and finaly sell advertizing time. In our new converging world, the radio ecosystem will be broader, richer and much more flexible. Everyone can be a braodcaster. Everyone can afford to be a braodcaster. To listeners, all this will bring more convenience and choice.
I have strong doubts that the new policy will address all the Broadcasting 2.0 challenges and opportunities but at least, CRTC seems to be willing to have look at them.
The BBC iMP is a great Broadcasting 2.0 software application. Since September, some lucky folks in the UK are actually testing it.
The software builds a peer to peer (P2P) network to support the distribution of BBC content. Each file is DRM protected and stays accessible for 7 days after its “transmission”. In other words, it’s a BBC only PVR with a one week memory. That’s quite limitative but hey, that’s just a trial. Let’s hope they get positive feedback from their community.
And in the meantime, the trial period has been extended until the end of February 2006.
Tony Ageh, BBC Controller, Internet says: “We really want to understand the benefits that iMP can bring to our audiences.
We know that there is likely to be a ‘honeymoon’ period of a few weeks, when our participants are likely to use iMP more often than normal. The data from the extra two months should really help us to comprehend what users want from the service and how they are using it.
“This will be invaluable for us in making our case to the BBC Board of Governors for a full roll out of iMP.”
A good post on “dose” where CBC’s vision of the future is questioned. That’s all Broadcasting 2.0.
Producing & disseminating audio is so cheap and easy now, and so much wonderful audio will be produced in the coming years — by smart public broadcasters, and also by joes and janes at home — all of it accessible on net. Why listen to CBC if they insist of becoming AOL audio, and do not understand what’s happening on the web? Why support an institution that does not reflect anything i believe in? (freedom, the responsibilities of a public broadcaster, diversity, non-commercialness etc).
In a comment, Tod Maffin provides some answers.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as its french counterpart SRC, has a limited but good podcast offering. CBC currently conducts a survey to better understand their listeners’ needs. Would I be paying for the podcast shows?
Before podcasting, my favorite radio show was “unavailable” to me. In fact, it airs daily from 9 to 11 AM while… guess what? …I’m at work. Podcasting is not just a nice to have alternative. It’s the only way I can access this great content (for which I paid for… some fractions of seconds of it at least!).
So before I have to pay for this, I would probably suggest to take down most of the costly FM transmitter networks and replace them by some inexpensive P2P seeding servers.
Bonjour!
My name is François Lefebvre. I’m a broadcast research engineer at CRC. This blog helps me explore some thoughts about the future of broadcasting. The views expressed here reflect my personal opinions and not necessarily those of my employer. Please do not hesitate to write your comments or to suggest stories.
Recent comments