CBC has kept pace with changes in broadcasting, technology: Rabinovitch

Last month, CBC president and CEO Robert Rabinovitch addressed the Law Society of Upper Canada’s national symposium. While CBC executives have been vocal on their plans for TV programming, the broadcaster’s convergent properties have received less coverage. In his speech, excerpted below, Rabinovitch outlines the CBC’s take on new media. For the 70 years that CBC/Radio-Canada has been around it has been relatively clear what we mean by broadcasting. Broadcasting, loosely defined, was the act of sending images and sounds from studios to transmitters and from there to radios and television sets across the country and, eventually, around the world. We assumed that consumers were passive, taking what we broadcast when we put it on the air. Today, audiences navigate almost seamlessly across media, watching television on iPods, watching the Olympics on cellphones, using VoIP to talk to friends overseas, and listening to radio via satellite. Just look at how CBC/Radio-Canada has evolved over the course of its history. Seventy years ago we were a radio broadcaster. Today we reach Canadians in English, French and eight Aboriginal languages, on 27 different platforms. Broadcasting is morphing. The boundaries between its traditional elements and other parts of the media universe are becoming indistinct… Through new platforms we’re rediscovering old audiences and finding new ones. For example, in the last six months there have been over four million downloads of CBC/Radio-Canada’s English and French podcasts. Who is doing the downloading? ...The 18-34 year old age group - not exactly your typical CBC Radio audience! And what are they downloading? Information, science and entertainment programs like Quirks & Quarks, Vinyl Café, Les Années lumière and Le sport autrement… We need to remember one thing, and that is - even in a world of incredible technological change, content is king and whoever owns the content and can re-purpose it for different platforms will flourish. We no longer think of ourselves as "television producers" or "radio producers". Today, we’re content producers. But in order to succeed we will need to be leaner, to have shorter lines of decision-making, to remove the bureaucracy that inhibits creativity and competitiveness. We need to open ourselves up to the broader creative community of Canada. We need to be less insular, less satisfied, and we need to move faster. We need to continue to look for ways of working with private partners… We must play a leading role in new technologies, whether we’re making our Olympics programming available for download on cell phones, or making our award-winning science and information programs available via satellite radio or as podcasts. As our viewers become more active in choosing the time and place for seeing or listening to our content, so too must we adjust and create new programs and content and re-purpose existing ones for new platforms. While we embrace the opportunities the changing world presents, we need more than just our good will and intent. We will also require adequate funding… In the coming months we expect there will be ample opportunity for us to engage our stakeholders in discussions about these very issues. Hopefully, these reviews will be forward-looking, as we approach the end of television as we know it.

CBC has kept pace with changes in broadcasting, technology: Rabinovitch

News | 05/29/2006 4:00 am EDT

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