The Gazette is in the middle of major technological transition behind the scenes, from Macs using QuarkXPress (version 3.32, circa 1996) and other specialized programs to PCs using Adobe InDesign under a system called Saxotech. Tech business reporter Jason Magder has been describing a bit of the process, particularly from a reporter's point of view.
The changeover has been happening in stages, as staff in various sections get training on the new system (while other staff, including additional hired help such as myself continue to put out the paper every day). The features sections went first, then business. This week was the go-live for the A section. The pages on the left (Tuesday and Wednesday) were created in QuarkXPress. Those on the right (Thursday and Friday) were done in InDesign.
Because the transition is being done in phases and not all at once, the designers had to create templates and stylesheets in InDesign that matched the old Quark pages. Some minor changes were made to clear up inconsistencies or make things easier for editors, but as you can see most of it basically looks the same.
To be clear, readers should not notice any major changes to the design, and no changes at all to content. (Although a bug in a process that is supposed to make it easier to copy articles from print to web causes random words to appear in the middle of sentences, which has peeved a few web readers.)
The next - and last - section to be moved over is sports, which has the latest deadlines. That's next week.
I wish I could say more about how the system works, but I'm in the very last group getting training (in a group that incidentally includes the editor-in-chief, so I guess I should be on my best behaviour). This puts me in the odd position of knowing less than almost all my colleagues when it comes to a computer system. You can't imagine how frustrating that can be for a guy with a computer science degree. But I'll muddle through these last couple of weeks.
As the playoffs come to an end, the NHL is tooting its own horn about the campaign, and specifically about the fan-produced videos, which are made possible mainly by the simplicity of the ads' creation - just a piece of video with cheap old-movie-style effects, played backwards in slow-motion with a piece of instrumental music.
It's a case study for the power of viral marketing, and how giving people the power to make their own media can be better than making it yourself.
But while these videos are all over the place, the NHL didn't make it easy for people to use the source material, and the thing executives are heralding now could soon become illegal.
Digital locks
The Canadian government recently introduced a bill, Bill C-32, which would update the Copyright Act to reflect changes in the digital age. I won't go too much into the details (feel free to read Michael Geist if you want to learn way too much about it), but there are two provisions that are pertinent here. One makes it legal to do mashups under certain circumstances (one being that it's not done for profit), which is certainly welcome.
The other is a much-criticized provision that, put simply, says that you can't circumvent a digital protection measure or "digital lock" on copyrighted content. That program you use to download DVDs to your hard drive? Illegal. That program or website that allows you to download YouTube videos? Illegal. It doesn't matter how easy it is to circumvent the lock, as long as the copyright holder tries to lock something down, you're not allowed to have access to it. And you can't have access to the tool that circumvents that measure either.
Among the most protective copyright holders are sports leagues. Before live broadcasts, many of them include a reminder that videos, photos or even descriptions of the game (by this they usually mean radio play-by-play) cannot be retransmitted or republished without the express written permission of the league. Though the NHL isn't as bad as Major League Baseball of the National Football League, those same conditions apply.
Except for recording off a TV, there is no easy, legal way of downloading video of these iconic (or just funny) NHL moments of history in order to create these mashups. Even buying a DVD wouldn't make it legal under this new law because those DVDs have digital locks. Creators have to first get access to the videos through some grey or black market - or find a way to circumvent or break the digital lock - before they can create their mashup. Some methods are really low-tech (like pointing a video camera at a TV screen), while others are the result of what might be considered hacking.
Let the people create
Here's a radical idea: The NHL should post short video clips of the greatest moments in hockey history in open formats and without any copy or access controls (UPDATE: They've already done this with the music used). Let them import the video directly into iMovie or Final Cut or Windows Movie Maker and have fun with them. Don't force your fans to jump through hoops to participate in your marketing campaign.
The same could be done for recent highlights. Thanks to Yahoo Sports, bloggers and others can post highlights of the previous night's game and discuss them. But while those videos are embeddable - and that's a pretty big step already -they're not downloadable.
Where the NHL will make money is in ticket sales, merchandising, and exclusive broadcast deals for live games. It's not in 30-second highlights of history that everyone can see on YouTube already anyway. It's not like you're getting compensation when those highlights appear on the nightly news.
Put it out there. Let your fans play with your golden moments. Like with the History Will Be Made campaign, you might be surprised how creative they can get with them.
You probably didn't know until this week about a journalist named Stéphane Malhomme.
It's OK, though, because two years out of journalism school, and a month into a job as a web editor for Canoe, his journalism career is over.
In case you didn't hear, Malhomme published an article on the website of Canal Argent, TVA's business network, about this guy Martin Tremblay who is fighting the government over tax money he thinks he doesn't owe them. Nothing particularly special about the story. It's topped with a quote from Tremblay (from an "exclusive" interview on Argent), and has a bunch of background below.
The article has since been pulled, but Google Cache still has it, and it was republished through the Agence QMI service, and appeared in the Journal de Montréal.
It didn't take long before the folks at Rue Frontenac, the website of the locked-out journalists and other workers at the Journal de Montréal, saw this piece and noticed that it bore a striking resemblance to one written by Martin Bisaillon that same day.
In fact, the resemblance was more than striking. Though the stories are not identical, some sentences and even entire paragraphs are. But Canoe's story makes no reference to Rue Frontenac.
Rue Frontenac cried foul, and by the next day TVA apologized for the plagiarism and said it had fired Malhomme. (As a contract worker, Malhomme did not have job security from the union.)
Pierre-Karl Péladeau, the big cheese behind Quebecor, caused a bit of a stink this week when he wrote an op-ed (published in French in Le Devoir and in English in the Financial Post) attacking the CBC over the fee-for-carriage debate, even though the CRTC has already decided that the CBC shouldn't be able to charge cable and satellite providers for permission to rebroadcast its signals.
The CBC (or, more accurately, Radio-Canada) has been a bug up Péladeau's butt for quite a while now. He's angry that the government-funded broadcaster competes with his privately-run TVA network, and similarly how its all-news network RDI competes with TVA's all-news network LCN.
It's not that he doesn't think there should be a public broadcaster. He just doesn't want there to be one that competes with the private networks, offering popular programming and in particular taking U.S. programs and re-airing them for profit. The Radio-Canada envisioned by Péladeau is more like CPAC, contributing to the public dialogue but not with anything that people actually want to watch. Certainly nothing anyone would want to pay to advertise on.
In a way, I can see where he's coming from. Imagine if you ran a business, and next door there's a competing business that gets heavily subsidized by the government. I'm sure the CBC bosses and supporters have a ready-made retort to attack that comparison (CBC boss Hubert Lacroix touched on some of them in the National Post), but even if it's not perfect, it still makes a strong point.
If only someone who's not Pierre-Karl Péladeau (or from some government-hating conservative think-tank) would make it, it might carry more weight.
This week, though, Péladeau added another aspect to his anti-CBC rant:
Furthermore, the CBC has launched the Tou.tv website without consulting the industry, a move that jeopardizes Canada’s broadcasting system by providing free, heavily subsidized television content on the Internet without concern for the revenue losses that may result, not only for the CBC but also for other stakeholders, including writers and directors.
By "without consulting the industry", he means, well, him. Tou.tv has programming from Télé-Québec, TV5, TFO and others. V and RDS aren't included, but they have their own websites that provide video on demand.
Péladeau argues about "heavily subsidized television content", which is hardly new to Tou.tv. Somehow, I suspect he might be a bit more angry at the fact that Tou.tv has become popular, and might even become a Québécois Hulu, leaving TVA in the dark.
You know what, I take back all that stuff I said about the Vancouver Olympic Committee being neglectful of Canada's other official language. Clearly they know what they're doing.
Of note is that now the entire Trans Canada Highway, from St. John's to Victoria (or Sydney to Vancouver, if you prefer) is on Street View. If someone wants to waste a lot of time, they can construct a video simulating a drive from one end of the country to the other.
February 5, 2010 – 4:49 am|Posted in Technology, TV
3600 secondes d'extase is all over Tou.tv. Marc Labrèche will show his face anywhere.
In case you hadn't noticed from coverage by La Presse, Canoe, Rue Frontenac, Branchez-Vous, MSN, Radio-Canada and, like, every other news media in Quebec, Radio-Canada last week launchedtou.tv, a video portal with content from Radio-Canada but also some other television networks like Télé-Québec, TV5, ARTV, TFO and others, including some European francophone channels. (The inevitable comparisons to Hulu followed quickly, even though Canadians can't use Hulu and therefore don't have much basis for comparison).
Notably absent from that list are V, the former TQS network that already puts all its content online on its own website, and anything owned by Quebecor, including TVA. Quebecor's strategy is to leverage its video content to improve the bottom line for its Videotron cable service. So the only way to get TVA shows on demand is to use Videotron's Illico video-on-demand service (which has most TVA content for free).
Still, even if it was just Radio-Canada stuff, it would be pretty cool. I'd finally get a chance to see two of my favourite shows - Tout le monde en parle and Infoman - on demand (I usually miss the initial airings of both).
How can that be? They're both Radio-Canada series. And because they're both about the news, you'd think they'd have a short shelf life. Wouldn't you want them to get maximum exposure in a short period of time? Are people going to buy DVDs of these shows in three years? (Well, maybe...)
Despite being on Facebook and Twitter, Tou.tv hasn't been communicating very well with users. Its first response on Twitter came a week after it launched, in which it reassured me (don't I feel special) that it's just getting started. I can understand that, though there's still a lot of viewer inquiries and stuff that's not being responded to, making it seem like it's being ignored.
There's also technical problems, like videos freezing halfway through, or (as I experienced) not being able to resume after a long pause. But I can understand that too, assuming they eventually fix it.
So what's up with TLMEP and Infoman? I sought out to inquire. I sent messages to Radio-Canada (for both shows), and to the production houses behind those shows: Avanti Ciné Video and Les productions Jacques K Primeau (TLMEP) and Zone 3 (Infoman). The only response I got was from Radio-Canada's Marie Tetreault, who said that they couldn't include these programs because of rights issues. (One of those annoying problems that even forced them to temporarily pull their own launch video).
"Il n'est pas prévu d'offrir la version intégrale en différé de Tout le monde en parle" was the final word.
So those hoping that these shows would soon be added to Tou.tv, don't hold your breath. They'll have the entire series of Et Dieu créa ... Laflaque!, Virginie, Tout sur moi, and the RBO Bye-Byes, but two of its biggest shows won't be added because Radio-Canada doesn't want to go through whatever trouble is necessary to secure the appropriate rights.
I could understand if this was a 20-year-old TV show, conceived long before the Internet existed, and which has some rights holders who can't be reached or something, but surely RadCan can come to some arrangement with its own shows to clear online on-demand rights for new episodes.
Last fall, I was asked to participate in a beta test of Rogers On Demand Online, a video streaming website for Rogers customers only. It has since launched and anyone who subscribes to Rogers Cable or Rogers Wireless can watch videos on the site. My review pointed out the disappointing video library, which included mostly Rogers-owned stuff like Citytv and a few specialty networks that didn't really excite me (and are also unavailable unless you subscribe to the channel with Rogers Cable).
A couple of weeks ago I was on the site watching the one series that's worth my attention - the West Wing through its Warner Brothers channel - when I noticed the video was a bit dark.
Make that very dark. I could barely make out what was going on in many scenes. Adjustments to my screen's brightness were futile. So I clicked on the "feedback" link on the video and said that it was too dark.
Most printed TV guides are shadows of what they once were. TV Guide no longer exists as a print publication in Canada, and weekly listings in newspapers have been cut back severely to save space. Now they consist only of grids, with little information inside. (The Gazette's TV Times doesn't even include staples anymore, a simple changed that caused some inconvenience but saved a lot of money.)
There are exceptions, though even Le Devoir's weekly TV section doesn't have complete descriptions of programs.
Besides the general downfall of the print industry due to the Internet, this death spiral is also being blamed on the convenience of on-screen guides for digital cable and satellite subscribers, even though sometimes those are less than helpful.
Online sucks too
Most media have encouraged people to go online to get their TV listings, pointing to websites that serve it automatically. Unfortunately most of these websites are poorly designed and poorly maintained, with little or no editorial oversight. Most fall under the set-it-and-forget-it philosophy.
The Journal (canoe.ca) online listings offer more channels, but not all, offer no customization for different providers or channel preferences, and have that annoying habit of giving undue preference to Quebecor-owned channels.
Even the ones you'd expect to get it right aren't perfect, though they're still better than what the newspapers offer:
TV Guide makes use of Zap2It, which has proper listings, but limits people to 100 channels and has minor but persistent errors, especially when it comes to network logos.
Yahoo uses its own system, which has proper listings and doesn't limit the number of channels. But it was created for the United States, defaults to U.S. channels until you figure out how to change it, and doesn't include logos for most Canadian channels. (Minor issues compared to the rest, but still an indication that the listings aren't checked at all by humans.)
Part of the problem also lies with the broadcasters themselves. Many of them have given up trying to provide individual episode information outside of their hit primetime series. Many shows get generic descriptions or no description at all. And because all the TV listings are done by computer now, nobody checks with the broadcasters to fill in the gaps in their schedules.
It's an indication of how little the media in general care about the quality of information they distribute to the public.
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