CBC.ca head promises streaming audio to return for next Games

The executive director of CBC.ca says recent Olympics coverage was a success by almost every measure, but that the absence of streaming audio remains a sticking point with the Mother Corp. Claude Galipeau tells Canadian NEW MEDIA that the public broadcaster couldn’t meet obligations to keep its live radio coverage restricted to Canada in time for this year’s event, but says he’s confident that by the time the Turin Winter Games arrive in 2006, the CBC will have the safeguards in place to keep its radio stream online instead of shutting it down for the duration of the games. Despite the absence of live radio coverage online of the games, Galipeau says the network’s electronic coverage was a spectacular success. He notes that the CBC.ca site saw a record-breaking 1.3 million visitors over the course of August 24, of whom 500,000 visited the various Olympics-related features. On the same day, there were 5.9 million page views, 2.7 million of those to Olympics-related materials. In total, the site far exceeded the 10 million page view mark promised to advertisers over the course of the games. Galipeau says CBC drew the viewers because of the content. "We consider it to be the most comprehensive (coverage) that was out there in the marketplace. And, I think much deeper and more valuable than much of the competition. In particular, NBC," he says. While Olympics coverage was prevalent across the web, he argues that CBC was able to provide a more complete picture than many rivals, especially in the U.S. "I think Canadians tastes are slightly more international. They would prefer a Canadian source than merely an American source on the Olympics that would be focusing almost exclusively on U.S. athletes." He notes that besides the outward manifestations of success, the event coverage was also an internal achievement as staff continue to prove the effectiveness of CBC-wide coordination for special events. Galipeau says planning for the event, including television and radio editorial, operations and design teams began in earnest last October. Compared with its last coverage of the games, he says this one was "light years" ahead in terms of planning. "What was different was that this was an example of a really integrated project management inside of CBC.ca, which was new." He notes that similar efforts went into coverage of the recent federal election, and that similar efforts are going into the CBC’s Greatest Canadian project. But, he notes, the coverage still didn’t include live radio on the site since CBC couldn’t geographically restrict the online signal. Asked whether the shutdown of radio coverage affected the number of visitors to the site, Galipeau answers that he’s unsure. "That’s an unknown. The places where it has been tested really have only been with the BBC and with NBC, and no one knows, yet, what their performance was. I’m more than likely to find out about the BBC. I don’t know about NBC." In time for Turin, however, the CBC has made necessary preparations to ensure the geo-specific restrictions that will keep the signal in Canada. The Corp. is now fully peered with ISPs such as Shaw, which will allow it to segment the distribution inside protected broadband networks. Further, the CBC is also now fully configured with Akamai Corp., which will allow it to do geolocation blocking. "We will be able to provide to Canadians a unique product next time round. But, there is an additional challenge, particularly with live radio, and on-demand newscasts, to be clean of Olympics materials that cannot be distributed outside the territories. We’re going to work on that in terms of feeds and editing inside of radio and TV. That’s complicated because at the moment we just distribute a live radio feed and we’ll probably have to have the kind of more fine-tuned substitution of signals, which demands quite a bit of work... "There’s two things. One, 30% of our traffic is foreign, and we don’t want to go dark to all our foreign users, and we certainly don’t want to go dark to our Canadian users…At the moment, most people, they shut down their streaming. The BBC shut down most of its streams, though it had some stuff inside the country. But, it was only if you were within a broadband network or they could block your IP." Despite the lack of streaming content, however, Galipeau expresses pleasure at the number of visitors. He says the numbers were needed. "We’re pleased with the fact that it helped us overcome some of the structural distribution issues we’re having with MSN and Sympatico (CNM, June 25/04). It helped make up for the loss of traffic we’ve suffered because they’ve taken us off the home page of their portal."

CBC.ca head promises streaming audio to return for next Games

News | 09/17/2004 4:00 am EDT

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