He's the guy in Quebec City who protested that CBC was going to shut down its TV transmitter there and not replace it with a digital one. Being a hockey fan, his main issue was that he wouldn't be able to get Hockey Night in Canada without cable.

In a decision published Tuesday morning, the CRTC decided to give the CBC another year to make the conversion in 22 markets that are large enough that the CRTC designated them for mandatory conversion but small enough that they do not have original programming and the CBC was prepared to pull the plug on them rather than spend millions on new transmitters.

These include transmitters in Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières and Chicoutimi that rebroadcast CBC Montreal. They also include a large number of Radio-Canada's transmitters outside Quebec. The Globe and Mail has a map here.

Breton wasn't the only one trying to stop his city from falling through the cracks. The city of London, Ont., actually passed a resolution demanding the CBC save its transmitter there.

Since Radio-Canada transmitters in Quebec are shutting down, the CBC is going to use the old Radio-Canada analog transmitters in Trois Rivières and Quebec City for CBC programming, taking advantage of the better coverage of those transmitters. On the flip side, its transmitter in Chicoutimi (Saguenay) will see its power drop significantly because it's on a channel that is supposed to be vacated.

Here's what's going on for each transmitter:

• CBMT Montreal must still terminate analog transmission on Channel 6 by Aug. 31. Its transitional digital transmitter on Channel 20 will move to Channel 21.
• CBJET Saguenay will drop in power significantly, going from 12,000 watts to just 496. Because it's running on Channel 58, which is one the government is forcing all television stations to move off of (big cities or small), it drops to low-power unprotected status. This also means that Industry Canada (which regulates frequency allocations) can force it to move frequencies if it wants to give it to someone else.
• CBMT-1 Trois-Rivières switches from Channel 28 to Radio-Canada's old spot on Channel 13, and gets a power boost from 33,000 to 47,000 watts, in order to increase its coverage area.
• CBVE-TV Quebec City switches from Channel 5 to Radio-Canada's old spot on Channel 11, and gets a power boost from 13,850 to 33,000 watts, increasing its coverage.
• CBMT-3 Sherbrooke remains operational, unchanged at 14,000 watts on Channel 50.
• Other retransmitters in Quebec (there are about 40 of them from Kuujuaq to Îles de la Madeleine) are not in mandatory markets and will remain running as they were before.

The CRTC's decision is understandable. It was backed into a corner by the CBC. Not allowing the extension would have meant forcing the CBC to shut down these transmitters - many of which are in minority-language markets - and would have meant, some have argued, failing in its mandate.

It's also the latest compromise on the digital transition. Originally the CRTC wanted every TV transmitter in Canada to be converted to digital. Then in 2009 it said only "mandatory markets" - capital cities, those with multiple stations and those with populations above 300,000. Then in March it removed the territorial capitals from the list of mandatory markets. And now CBC and Radio-Canada retransmitters won't have to make the transition.

In 2009, I argued that the digital TV transition is a counterproductive waste of money. Two years later, with the deadline only two weeks away, this seems even more clear. Broadcasters are waiting in some cases until literally the last minute (midnight from Aug. 31 to Sept. 1) to switch their analog transmitters with digital ones, because they know that the analog transmitters reach a larger audience. The fact that the CBC is pushing for a delay and that so few transmitters are being changed outside of mandatory markets is a clear indication that market forces aren't pushing hard in the direction of digital TV.

And why should they? Having high definition is nice, but the vast majority of people rich enough to have purchased high-definition TVs also have cable or satellite service. Most of those on analog TV are either too poor to afford a subscription service or are too disinterested in TV to spend the money.

Digital television is being forced on us for reasons that still elude me. The government wants to auction off TV channels 52-69 for wireless services, but analog transmitters in those frequencies can be reassigned lower channels without converting them to digital (there certainly aren't more than 50 television transmitters operating within range of Quebec City or Moncton).

Analog over-the-air television has existed using roughly the same technology for more than half a century. Forcing broadcasters to spend millions on hundreds of new transmitters and consumers to spend hundreds on millions of new televisions (or digital converters for their existing sets) without a clear need seems ridiculous.

UPDATE (Aug. 17): Actually, Breton isn't happy. He's calling the decision a "false compromise", says the CRTC should have forced the CBC to install a digital transmitter in all mandatory markets, and points out that because most digital converter boxes don't pick up analog signals, people won't be able to easily switch between CBC and other channels in these markets.

Related Posts

• Even more details about Montreal’s digital TV transition
• TV gets shut down for maintenance
• Tou.tv: Menace to society?
• RadCan pulls plug on online RDI streaming
• Battle of the MS Paint

I think what worries me most about the weather, as I saw it on tonight's Téléjournal, isn't that major cities on the west side of the country are farther east than they should be, but that the wind there is so strong it is repeatedly pushing Calgary into Edmonton.

Related Posts

• Butterfingers
• RadCan needs geography lessons
• My Grey Cup screwup
• Metro screws up, but it’s just the wrong name
• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running

This parody of Céline Dion and Julie Snyder: Funniest segment of the night, or mean-spirited attack on Quebecor? In this case, funny is in the eye of your employer

It's tradition in Quebec media to review each year's end-of-year special from Radio-Canada, the Bye-Bye. It went a bit crazy two years ago when Véronique Cloutier and Louis Morissette decided to take their first crack at it. So much so that there wasn't one to end 2009.

So you can imagine how much everyone was anxious to see what would happen when Cloutier and Morissette decided they would throw themselves into the gauntlet again and host the Bye-Bye 2010.

I watched it, along with my family, on New Year's Eve, and followed the reaction live on Twitter. My first thoughts were that it was pretty impressive, that they weren't overcompensating by pulling their punches compared to 2008, and that it wasn't likely to offend anyone ... or at least, no one not working for Quebecor.

The consensus was that the production values were good (particularly makeup and prosthetics, which in some cases made the actors barely recognizable as themselves and instantly recognizable as their targets), the parodies were well done, and the music videos were great, but the jokes fell flat, which is kind of the most important part.

The first professional reviews came quickly afterward (Richard Therrien's was up in less than an hour). But many others waited because they were to go in newspapers, and many of them published neither on New Year's Day nor on Sundays. It would be more than 48 hours before some people would read anything about it.

Here are some of the reviews that came out:

• Therrien's blog post and later print review in Le Soleil gave the Bye-Bye high marks, calling it "excellent" and saying it achieved its goal of making up for the 2008 show.
• 7 jours had a review by Patrick Delisle-Crevier that was picked up by Agence QMI. It was more of a recap than a review, but the headline said "mission accomplie", which seems pretty clear.
• Rue Frontenac's Pascale Lévesque gave it "two thumbs up", particularly for some of the jokes at Quebecor's expense and a wink in the direction of locked-out journalists.
• Le Droit's Valérie Lessard thought it was well done, though she found the segments on Enfants de la télé and Joël Legendre sounded a bit too much like they were plugging these projects rather than just making fun of them.
• The Gazette's Brendan Kelly bemoaned the lack of controversy, and agreed with others that it was better than 2008 but not an all-time great.
• Steve Proulx wrote on his Yahoo! column that the entire concept should be thrown out the window, and that Infoman's special was much better than "du sous-Marc Labrèche"
• Le Devoir's Stéphane Baillargeon found the show too simplistic, echoing the sentiment that Infoman was the better special and that celebrity impersonations should be left to Marc Labrèche
• La Presse's Hugo Dumas noted that the "guerre des médias" wasn't put on hold for this special
• La Clique du Plateau had a simple list of the good points and bad

Oh Lord...

Of course, none of these really mattered. What mattered was the review of Michelle Coudé-Lord, the arts editor at the Journal de Montréal.

From the Journal de Montréal for Jan. 3

The headline on Monday morning was "Un Bye-Bye prudent", which was a positive sign. It began with some compliments toward the show and its hosts. But then, as if on cue, Coudé-Lord took issue with them making fun of TVA for reasons that I'm sure are entirely unrelated to the fact that Quebecor owns TVA and the Journal de Montréal:

Encore une fois, la formule du couple vedette de Radio-Canada est restée la même, on tape sur les émissions de TVA plus méchamment que sur celles de Radio-Canada et on devient extrêmement mesquin envers Julie Snyder et Céline Dion.

Le sketch Des nouvelles de Céline fut le plus dur de la soirée.

Véronique Cloutier en Julie Snyder et Louis Morissette en René Angelil... s'en sont donnés à coeur joie.

«On va vous offrir la visite de l'utérus de Céline; Denis Lévesque va recevoir le placenta de Céline ou j'ai signé un contrat de trois ans d'amitié entre toi et Julie Snyder...» C'est mesquin, totalement gratuit et surtout pas drôle. Un numéro qui, espérons-le, a fait du bien au couple Cloutier-Morissette.

The next day in the Journal de Québec, Jean-Jacques Samson went one step further, taking issue not only with the Céline Dion/Julie Snyder parody but with Jean-François Mercier making comments about shale gas exploration. To many people, these were among the funniest parts of the night, but to him it was unacceptable vulgarity, apparently all part of a Radio-Canada conspiracy to use our tax money to attack the right wing of Quebec society.

I have to admit, my reaction watching the show for the first time was that it did take a lot more shots at TVA shows than those of Radio-Canada (the fact that it spent so much time parodying TV shows is something a few critics have pointed to as a weak spot). Wanting some qualitative data to back that up, I rewatched it and scored each sketch. Making fun of Quebecor TV shows got a +1, Radio-Canada shows (or the hosts themselves) got a -1, and I adjusted those based on how deep the digs were.

The segments, in chronological order:

• A parody of Rencontres paranormales on TVA - targets the show and host Chantal Lacroix (+1)
• A bunch of jokes comparing politicians to annoying family members at a holiday party (0)
• On a échangé nos maires (parody of On a échangé nos mères on Canal Vie, which is just Wife Swap dubbed in French) - targeting the mayors of Montreal and Quebec City (0)
• A parody of Marie-Mai's C'est Moi, targeting the Marche Bleue, the campaign to use taxpayer money to build a hockey arena in Quebec City, and a brief dig at Pierre-Karl Péladeau wanting to own it all (+1/2)
• A parody of Julie Snyder's interview with Céline Dion on TVA, targeting the Dion family, Snyder and the relationship between them. Because Dion these days seems to be as much a product of Quebecor as Snyder (or at least that's how it's portrayed), and it's filled with digs at TVA, I'll mark this (+2)
• A parody of Le dîner de cons, targetting Stephen Harper (0)
• Dubois en promotion, a parody of Dubois en réalité on V targeting the show and Dubois's career (0)
• A parody of the Bastarache commission targeting the commission, lawyer Suzanne Côté, and Jean Charest (0)
• A parody of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, targeting Liberal party fundraiser Franco Fava and Charest (0)
• A parody of a Jean Coutu commercial, targeting BP (0)
• A sketch involving André Caillé exploring for shale gas in the back yard of the "king de V", Jean-François Mercier (0)
• A parody of Les Trois Accords's Elle s'appelait Serge, making fun of Joël Legendre for being a "girouette" with regard to Quebecor to sell his recipe book. (-1/2)
• Lance et crampe, a parody of Lance et compte on TVA, targeting the show and ... being old (+1)
• A parody of a musical commercial for Déménagement La Capitale targeting Jean Charest (0)
• A parody of a Toyota commercial targeting its braking problems (0)
• Les Arrièrés, a parody of Les rescapés on Radio-Canada, targeting Cardinal Marc Ouellet and the Catholic church (0)
• A sketch about Chilean miners as a parody of a Swiffer commercial (0)
• A second sketch about the Chilean miners targeting Occupation Double (TVA) contestant JoÈve (+1)
• On prend toujours un arrière-train, a parody of On prend toujours un train on Radio-Canada, targeting Anne-Marie Losique and her new adult pay TV channel, including a dig at V's Zéro à $1000 (0)
• A parody of Taxi 0-22 featuring poker champ Jonathan Duhamel, targeting Rogatien's political views but not really making fun of the show itself (0)
• Another parody of Taxi 0-22 featuring figure skater Joannie Rochette (0)
• Just after midnight, a joke about Quebec's sales tax going up to 8.5% (0)
• A parody of a Nissan commercial, targeting the G20 summit and its fake lake (0)
• Les restants de la télé, a parody of Les enfants de la télé on Radio-Canada, targeting Cloutier, Morisette, Antoine Bertrand, Kevin Parent, Pauline Marois and Clotaire Rapaille (-1 1/2)
• Marc Hervieux singing Shakira's Waka Waka (0)
• A sketch making fun of Xavier Dolan (0)
• On bouche une case horaire la semaine, a parody Ça finit bien la semaine on TVA, targeting the show, Mélanie Maynard, Guy Nantel, Patrick Huard and Anik Jean (+1 1/2)
• A parody of a Subway commercial targeting Scott Gomez's salary (0)
• A music video featuring Canadiens coach Jacques Martin being auto-tuned (0)
• Le vrai bafouillateur, a parody of Le vrai négociateur on LCN, targeting the show and host Claude Poirier (+1)
• A sketch about the marriage of Grégory Charles, targeting the entertainer (0)

The net total: +7. Seven segments made direct jokes at the expense of Quebecor shows or personalities (as opposed to simply using parodies of shows as a conduit to make jokes at other people's expense), and the only ones at Radio-Canada's expense were one making fun of Joël Legendre (and that's not even really a Radio-Canada thing) and the stuff about Les Enfants de la télé, the show produced by Cloutier and Morissette that would have been really weird if they didn't parody.

Coudé-Lord suggests EDLT was included just so that they could go after TVA shows. I doubt they thought about it so clinically, and they made jokes at the expense of V as well, but I find it difficult to believe they couldn't take some good shots at a single other Radio-Canada program. Tout le monde en parle? C'est juste de la TV? Le club des ex? Or is it that Radio-Canada hasn't put anything new that's really good or interesting on TV other than that archive clip show?

I'll leave the judgment up to you, not that it really matters. Who keeps a scorecard watching a comedy show?

The ratings

As a quantitative measure of its power, we can look at Bye-Bye's ratings, though those might come with an asterisk because they only include live viewers and not those who watched from PVRs or online.

According to Therrien, the Bye-Bye had 2.315 million viewers on New Year's Eve, and another 1.33 million when it was repeated the next day. Though the numbers were less than they were in 2008, Dumas points out that 82% of Quebec francophone TV viewers that night were tuned to Radio-Canada.

Until TVA puts serious effort into some late New Year's Eve show (it didn't even try competing this year), Bye-Bye will have a nearly unanimous audience. This year won't change that.

Credit where it's due

The jokes might not have been the best in the world, but everyone loved the production values. Sadly, the list of people involved with the show on its website is incomplete. The show that aired included names of people who did prosthetics (Stéphane Tessier), costumes (Diane Lavoie, Sylvie Beaudoin, Marie-Lynn Beaulieu, Véronique Leblond), original music (Nicholas Savard-L'Herbier), makeup (Bruno Rhéaume and Olivier Xavier, with chief makeup artist Charlotte Vézina), hair (Manon Côté and Stéphanie Tremblay, with chief Louis Bond, stylist Catherine Demers and perruquière Géraldine Courchesne). It also properly credits Pierre-Luc Gosselin, who directed the music videos.

Eagle-eyed viewers also caught the name of Pierre-Luc Cloutier, credited as "recherchiste" - who got to know Véronique Cloutier as a member of Dans ma télé, a group that recently disbanded after Cloutier decided he didn't have enough free time to devote to such a volunteer measure.

Find this parody of Marie-Mai's C'est moi - 5 minutes of scanning on Tou.tv or 5 seconds of searching on YouTube

Learn from YouTube

You'd think that a show based almost entirely of individual clips would be put online in such a way that those clips would be individually accessible. Unfortunately, both the version on their website and the one on Tou.tv only offer it as one hour-and-a-half block with no table of contents.

The result is that if I'm looking, say, for that Véronique-Cloutier-as-Lady-Gaga parody everyone was talking about, I have to go to a bootleg version on YouTube. It has 19,000 views, which is 19,000 eyeballs that Radio-Canada or its Tou.tv website could have tried to sell advertising for.

Tou.tv is nice, but it's not enough to throw an hour and a half of video online and break it up at the commercials. Online video is about searching and sharing. It's about embedding into Facebook posts so people can share and comment.

Of all the things about this Bye-Bye, that ignorance of how online video works socially is what disappointed me the most.

If you haven't seen it yet, the entire Bye-Bye 2010 is on Tou.tv.

UPDATE (Jan. 19): Le Soleil's Richard Therrien says people's memories are fuzzy when they say that this year's Bye-Bye was particularly mean toward politicians.

Related Posts

• Dear Véro and Louis
• Bye-Bye 2010: Redemption
• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Strong winds out west
• Happy Birthday, CBWFT

If you haven't seen this video yet, the rest of this post probably won't interest you.

So a year and a half after a rather disastrous end-of-year Bye-Bye special that got a bit of media coverage and resulted in complaints to the CRTC, Radio-Canada has decided that, what they hey, they'll bring back the team that produced it to try again. Véronique Cloutier and Louis Morissette will be at the helm of Bye-Bye 2010. They announced the move with a parody of their well-publicized apology from January 2009.

The media, after receiving assurances that this wasn't some strange joke and getting their web geeks to setup the YouTube embed codes, reacted much as you might expect: "kamikazes de l’humour", "perplexing", or, simply, "pourquoi?"

While I was one of those people who didn't think highly of Bye-Bye 2008, Cloutier and Morissette deserve a chance to make amends. They screwed up, and while it took them forever to realize that, I think they'll do a better job for 2010.

Radio-Canada is making sure the same mistakes don't repeat. This year's special will have no live component, which means lawyers and political-correctness censors will be all over the entire show before it goes to air.

Expect an overreaction to the problems of 2008, and perhaps a bit too much sensitivity to visible and cultural minorities. And don't expect any mention of Nathalie Simard, unless she's on it as a guest.

And really, who else could do this? The insane media coverage, and the cancellation of Bye-Bye 2009, ensured that any future show would have no choice but to reference - and be compared to - the one from 2008.

If this video is any indication, Cloutier and Morissette will put targets on their own backs for the sake of comedy. That alone makes me want to give them a second chance.

Related Posts

• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Dear Véro and Louis
• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Strong winds out west
• Happy Birthday, CBWFT

Today marks the 50th anniversary of CBWFT, Radio-Canada's station in Winnipeg and the only francophone television station serving Manitoba.

The local station has gone all out with the anniversary, producing special programs looking back at the station's history. Radio-Canada even sent Céline Galipeau to St. Boniface on Thursday to host the national Téléjournal there in honour of the occasion, the most attention Radio-Canada has paid to something outside Quebec in quite some time.

CBWFT is also launching a weekend local newscast starting this evening. Aside from a regional lifestyle show covering the prairies, there's not much local programming produced out of there outside of the newscasts. Still, despite the dwindling francophone population (and hence the difficulty in getting good French-speaking journalists to work there), they produce quite a bit of local news - and as of this weekend there will be more local news for franco-Manitobans than English-speaking Quebecers.

As you'd see looking at some of the retrospectives, the history of Radio-Canada in Manitoba is fundamentally tied to the history of the francophone community there. Debates over official bilingualism, the Société franco-manitobaine, and the rift between anglo and franco Manitobans all have direct impact over CBWFT.

Not that you'd hear about any of that stuff from watching Radio-Canada and RDI outside of those local newscasts. Even as a Montrealer, it's patently obvious how the importance of news on that network is directly proportional to its proximity to 1400 René-Lévesque East. Montreal mayoral debates air nationally, the national Téléjournal leads with what Jean Charest had for breakfast, La Petite séduction - a show about small francophone communities - has visited Manitoba only once in more than 65 episodes (it's been outside Quebec only nine times, by my count), and Infoman treats going to Vancouver like he needs a visa to get there. The occasional new story or interview with Régis Labeaume is about as regional as it gets most of the time.

Maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe Radio-Canada should concentrate on where its viewers are, and the vast majority are in Quebec, going to work in Montreal or Quebec City.

But as CBWFT has shown for the past 50 years, the French language doesn't stop at the Outaouais, and there are francophones in Canada who have kept their culture going in areas where their language is truly in danger of extinction.

Here's hoping it will keep the struggle going for another 50.

Related Posts

• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Strong winds out west
• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Bye-Bye 2010: Redemption

A typo during Le Verdict (Episode 3)

I realize even Habs players can't spell Cammalleri (and I'm sure it's been wrong at least a dozen times in my newspaper), but this is Radio-Canada primetime, folks.

UPDATE: A bunch of people have pointed out that Bell also has trouble checking the spelling of "Cammalleri".

Related Posts

• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Strong winds out west
• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Bye-Bye 2010: Redemption
• Yummy bolagna

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.

TVA, meanwhile, doesn't offer shows on demand online, even those shows that you'd think would get a pretty high audience there. Instead, it offers them on Videotron's Illico on demand (Videotron, by wacky coincidence, is also owned by Quebecor).

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.

Mind you, Hulu isn't making money either.

Related Posts

• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Tou.tv, not quite tout
• Battle of the MS Paint
• CBC cuts 800 jobs
• Should the CBC dump 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 launched tou.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).

Oh but wait, neither show is part of Tou.tv's vast repertoire.

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.

Right?

UPDATE (Feb. 16): La Presse explores producers' worries about Tou.tv eating into their revenue.

Related Posts

• Tou.tv: Menace to society?
• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Strong winds out west
• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Bye-Bye 2010: Redemption

You know what, I have to admit the Olympic Stadium actually makes kind of a cool futuristic-looking spaceship.

This is the starship Entrecrise of Stade Trek, part of the end-of-year special of Et dieu créa ... Laflaque. It and the other new year's eve special programming of Radio-Canada (Infoman, Tout le monde en parle) is available for online streaming until the end of January.

Related Posts

• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Un souper presque Epic
• Strong winds out west
• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Bye-Bye 2010: Redemption

Wednesday sees the players and fans meet to celebrate for the victory parade down Ste. Catherine St., from Crescent to Jeanne-Mance starting at 11:40am.

Surprisingly, despite it being a local event (and one coming with little advance notice), there's going to be actual live coverage of it by local television.

Here's what's been announced:

• Global (CKMI) will have live coverage from 11:30am to 1:30pm (Mike LeCouteur with The Gazette's Herb Zurkowsky and the Q's Ken Connors). It will also be streaming the parade live at globalmontreal.com
• CTV (CFCF) will have live coverage from noon to 1:30pm, preempting its entire noon newscast. Sports reporters will be in the crowd, Mutsumi Takahashi and Randy Tieman at the end of the route. Lori Graham and Todd van der Heyden will be in the parade itself. It will livestream the entire parade at montreal.ctv.ca
• CBC (CBMT) has no announced live coverage
• Radio-Canada will not have live TV coverage on the main network, but will be livestreaming the parade at radio-canada.ca/sports
• TVA and V have nothing announced as far as live coverage
• RDI will have a live special from 11:30am to 1:30pm. Simon Durivage hosts with Marc André Masson, Jean St-Onge, Jacinthe Taillon, Antoine Deshaies and former Als player Bruno Heppell
• LCN has not announced anything, but expect it to give good coverage to the parade
• RDS will have live parade coverage from 11:30am to 2pm (it's the only network to actually change its electronic and online schedule to reflect the coverage) with David Arsenault, Marc Labrecque, Pierre Vercheval and Denis Casavant.
• TSN has not announced anything, but considering their current plan for noon is World Championship Darts...

So that's four channels carrying live TV specials (CFCF, CKMI, RDI and RDS), and three sources for live online streaming, at least.

Maybe what's surprising is that, in this local TV death spiral, I find this surprising.

(Of course, you won't be watching the parade on TV because you'll be on Ste. Catherine St. celebrating, right?)

UPDATE: CTV Montreal and RDS have archived footage of the parade and party afterward. The Gazette and Rue Frontenac have put together artisty videos.

Related Posts

• The Alouettes parade and the two solitudes
• Photos: Behind the scenes at the Grey Cup party
• Even more details about Montreal’s digital TV transition
• Ratings: CFCF dominates, but CBMT’s happy
• CFCF, RDS to get studio upgrades

But I'm not sure about the picture they used to illustrate it.

I realize cutouts like this are used often in printed newspapers without an indication that the photo has been manipulated, but it's clearly called for here, no?

I mean, some people notice these things.

UPDATE (Nov. 13): After being alerted to the error, Cyberpresse has fixed the image. Apparently an online editor took the cutout (used for a section front) and didn't think to replace it with the original photo.

Related Posts

• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Tou.tv: Menace to society?
• CBC cuts 800 jobs
• Should the CBC dump TV?
• Caption CBC president Hubert Lacroix

You must remember it. There were dozens of articles written in January about it.

Anyway, the special was criticized for crossing the lines a few times, particularly with jokes about Barack Obama, Jonathan Roy, Nathalie Simard and anglophones. Hundreds of complaints were registered with the CRTC, whom we learned is responsible for regulating such things with the CBC.

Because of the nature of these complaints, the CRTC decided to do something a bit unusual and referred the case to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. The CBSC is an independent body setup by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters that judges just these sorts of things. But the CAB is an association of private broadcasters, and the CBC/Radio-Canada isn't part of it. Instead, the CRTC itself must judge violations of ethics codes and anti-discrimination laws by the public broadcaster.

The CBSC met in March and in May it released a decision that judged Radio-Canada to be in violation on three points:

• Jokes against blacks, particularly the sketch involving Denis Lévesque and Barack Obama as well as comments from Jean-François Mercier about Obama being easier to shoot in front of the White House.
• The portrayal of violence against women in a sketch involving the family of Patrick Roy.
• The rebroadcast of the show the next evening without viewer advisories.

But it dismissed a bunch of other complaints, including:

• Jokes about Nathalie Simard
• Jokes about anglophones
• Jokes about the poor
• Jokes about immigrants, dépanneur owners and Indian call centres
• Jokes about Julie Couillard
• Jokes about Céline Dion
• Jokes about politicians
• Jokes about General Motors

The CSBC didn't call for any pennance for these misdeeds. Instead, the report went to the CRTC for it to judge.

On Monday, the CRTC issued its decision (with accompanying press release) that upheld most of what the CBSC judged, with one notable exception: no fault was found with the Patrick Roy/Jonathan Roy sketch, which the CRTC judged did not glorify violence and did not show it in a positive light that might suggest it was promoting it.

The CRTC has called for Radio-Canada to issue a full, unequivocal apology (RadCan and the show's creators have made a lot of "I'm sorry but" statements) and put procedures in place so that this doesn't happen again, but no fines or other punishments have been levied for these violations.

That apology will no doubt generate another news cycle for this story (RadCan's immediate response was to say they're studying the decision), and then we'll be finally done with it.

At least, until the next Bye-Bye appears on the horizon. New Year's Eve is only four months away.

More coverage:

• The Gazette
• Canadian Press
• CBC
• CTV Montreal
• Presse Canadienne
• Radio-Canada
• Cyberpresse
• Showbizz.net
• Reuters América Latina
• Times of India (Associated Press)

Related Posts

• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• CRTC Roundup: Videotron must closed-caption porn
• An English commercial radio station in Hudson/St. Lazare?
• Sherbrooke radio station shuts down
• Rejected AM radio stations preparing Plan B

The month, the CRTC ruled that, well, yes, they should.

While you might think it common sense that such programs should be excluded from closed-captioning requirements, the CRTC said that children should have access to captioning so they can learn to read, and parents should have access to what their children watch. There wasn't much discussion about the porn angle, namely that nobody cares what people are saying in pornographic movies.

In any case, the CRTC said Videotron hadn't made a case that it's so financially strapped that it can't afford captioning costs, so the application was denied.

Konrad's oopsie

The CRTC chairman said sorry for saying that conventional broadcasters like CTV and Global wouldn't commit to taking carriage fees from cable and satellite providers and putting all that money into local programming. It turns out they were ready to make just such a commitment.

That certainly makes the TV people look better. But what guarantee would we have that they wouldn't take back their existing funding to local stations now that this new source of revenue is available to them?

Bye Bye was wrong

You hate to still be talking about this, but the judgment is in about Radio-Canada's Bye-Bye: It really was racist. The CRTC passed on complaints to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council and asked them to judge the show. The CBSC normally rules only on private broadcasting, but the CRTC asked them for their advice (if anything, this shows that there's no reason the CBSC shouldn't also deal with complaints about public broadcasting).

The CBSC's ruling dismissed most of the complaints (though some only barely), including those about jokes on anglos, the poor, immigrants, dépanneur owners, Indian call centre operators, Julie Couillard, Céline Dion, politicians, and a single complaint saying they were unfair to GM. It also said that the show did not go over the line in its treatment of Nathalie Simard, and didn't even hint at the abuse she suffered at the hands of Guy Cloutier, father of Bye Bye hotst Véronique Cloutier.

The council did rule that three things crossed the line:

• Jokes against blacks, particularly the sketch involving Denis Lévesque and Barack Obama as well as comments from Jean-François Mercier about Obama being easier to shoot in front of the White House.
• The portrayal of violence against women in a sketch involving the family of Patrick Roy.
• The rebroadcast of the show the next evening without viewer advisories.

The racist jokes, the council said, were gratuitous and abusive. Though Radio-Canada, the show's producers, its writers and its performers did not intend to foster racism and intended for the comments to be ironic, the council ruled that the context didn't make this sufficiently clear, and the comments could easily have been taken at face value. It brought up a number of previous cases to support its view that comedic irony isn't a blank cheque to make racist comments.

It's hard not to agree with the council's well-thought-out decision. Bye Bye didn't intend to be racist, but it did intend to shock. And when you're spouting racist comments just to shock people, how is that different from just being racist?

This decision is worth reading if only for the words "a rather cartoonish rabbit-like act of intercourse."

Technically, this is just a recommendation to the CRTC. It is up to the commission to decide if it agrees, and if so what kind of sanction it will impose. Normally, private broadcasters are required to air a notice of the decision to viewers. We'll see if the CRTC orders Radio-Canada to do the same.

More power for radio

It's going to be a bit easier to listen to some out-of-town radio stations thanks to some CRTC approvals of power increases:

• CKOY 104.5 FM in Sherbrooke, the sister station to Montreal's CKOI, gets a huge power boost to up to 50,000 Watts. Of course, that doesn't mean it'll be easy to hear, especially with CBC Radio One's second 100W transmitter at 104.7 FM in the west end. But if you're in the Eastern townships and had trouble hearing the station, you should have much less of that now.
• CJLM 103.5 FM in Joliette gets a modest boost from 3,000 to 4,500 Watts, which will help people on the north side of the island and on the north shore.
• For those on the south side, they'll be hearing FM 103.3 in Longueuil, which in the same decision saw its allowed power output grow more than five-fold. It's still a low-power community radio station, but maybe now it won't disappear off the dial when I hit the Plateau.

Haitian station wants change of frequency

CJWI, a Haitian AM station currently on 1610 AM, wants to change its frequency to 1410, which is where CFMB used to be. The move would put CJWI in the regular, non-extended AM band, allowing people with older radios to hear it. It also wants to increase its output power from 1kW to 10kW, and relocate its transmitter.

Rogers, small cable companies get nannied

The Canadian Cable Systems Alliance asked the CRTC to intervene in stalled negotiations it was having on behalf of small cable companies across the country with Rogers over its SportsNet service. The CRTC has the power to intervene in these cases, but it prefers not to. However, since regulations require some cable companies to carry SportsNet (and will until new regulations take effect in 2011 that deregulate the cable sports channels), it decided it must step in here. Details are kept in confidence to protect both businesses, so that's about all we know.

Slice wants less CanCon

Canwest-owned Slice channel has noticed that its Canadian content requirements are much higher than what other specialty channels require, so it wants to get the same deal. It's asking that its CanCon minimum programming requirement be dropped from 82.5% to 60%, and that it be forced to spend only 45% instead of 71% of revenues on Canadian programming.

City wants less CanCon movies

Citytv has asked the CRTC for a change in license that would eliminate a requirement to air 100 hours of Canadian movies each year - which works out to about a movie a week. Rogers (which owns City now) argues that it is the only conventional broadcaster that has this requirement and it shouldn't be singled out. Canadian movie-makers say Rogers has pulled a bait and switch, praising Canadian movies when it bought the network and now quietly wanting to get rid of them.

Want Al-Jazeera?

The CRTC is opening up the can of worms about allowing Al-Jazeera English into the country. The commission had previously approved the Arabic-language version of the network, with unique requirements that distributors monitor and censor its content, something that requires far too much work for the cable and satellite companies.

The commission is considering adding the English channel to eligible foreign networks that cable and satellite can add to their lineups, but it wants comments from Canadians who might be opposed to it. They specifically want evidence of abusive comments, with tapes if possible.

More specialty channels

Conventional TV may be dying, but specialty channels are exploding like nobody's business. The CRTC is holding a hearing on July 21 where it will listen to proposals for new networks:

• Black Entertainment Television Canada (English and French) - self-explanatory, I would imagine.
• Reality TV - A Canwest proposal for reality shows, DIY programs and scripted reality shows. This network was originally approved by the CRTC in 2005, but expired before Canwest could launch it, forcing them to start over from scratch.
• AMET-TV, an African and Afro-Caribbean-themed channel that carries programming in English (70%), French (20%) and African languages (10%)
• New Tang Dynasty Television Canada HD, a generalist network mainly in Mandarin but also other Chinese languages.

CPAC wants to be patriotic

CPAC, the politics channel that carries House of Commons proceedings among other things, is asking for permission to expand its boundaries on July 1 of each year. It wants to add three programming categories which would allow it to carry musical performance, variety, entertainment and related programming from Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill and elsewhere. A reasonable request if I've ever heard one, though I don't think there are similarly specific exceptions to such rules on other channels.

A bold move

The CBC was in the process of getting slapped by the CRTC because it was violating its license with respect to Bold, a specialty channel. Formerly Country Canada, its license says it should air programming directed toward rural Canadians. But since then it's basically been a dumping ground for whatever content the network wants to put there.

After the CRTC called a hearing, the CBC waved the white flag. It has proposed a license amendment, though one that would keep the rural focus.

Good news, bad news for Olympics

Following a request from the CRTC chairman, CTV and the CBC have been in talks about using CBC stations to broadcast French-language Olympics coverage for the tiny, tiny portion of Canadians who:

• are unilingual francophones
• don't live in Quebec or within range of a TQS station
• don't have cable or satellite TV service
• don't have broadband Internet access
• AND want to watch the Olympics in French on TV

You'd think this number would be so small as to be negligible (about 10,000 apparently fit the first three criteria), but in the spirit of political correctness, CTV (which owns the broadcast rights and is part of a giant consortium that's covering the games) is looking at using some CBC stations to retransmit its TQS/RDS Olympics coverage over the air.

The problem is that the CBC isn't crazy about donating the stations and getting nothing in return. Specifically, the debate is over ad revenue: CTV wants to keep it all (minus some compensation for what they would have had with their regular programming), and CBC thinks that's crazy.

On the plus side, Corus has joined the giant consortium, which currently includes CTV (with TSN and RDS), TQS, Rogers and APTN. Corus will have Olympics coverage (though it doesn't sound like much) on CKAC Sports as well as updates on CKOI, Info 690 and 98.5FM in Montreal.

In other news

• Bell ExpressVu (now Bell TV) has been allowed to continue the practice of having part-time channels. Currently, the satellite provider which is tight for space and already has 30 channels used up by conventional local television stations from the big three networks alone (almost 70 if you include CTV, CBC, Global, Radio-Canada, TVA, TQS, E!, A, City and OMNI), allows people to access newscasts from other stations through use of two shared channels, that carry the newscasts from CJOH (CTV Ottawa), CBC Fredericton, CBC Charlottetown, CFER (TVA) Rimouski and CBLFT (Radio-Canada) Toronto.
• Approved for broadcast in high definition: Leafs TV (it wasn't already?), Bite TV, AUX TV, TREK TV. Equator HD gets the reverse, approved for a standard-definition version.
• Media concentration continues: Two Kingston radio stations have been bought up by Rogers.
• ARTV wants more flexibility in programming
• Movie Central, western Canada's version of The Movie Network, has asked to be allowed to distribute in HD.
• Coaticook, Quebec (just southeast of Sherbrooke) wants a community radio station.
• The CRTC has approved a bid by World Impact Ministries to buy the Christian Channel. As a matter of policy, the CRTC goes over sales carefully when they happen shortly after launch or change in ownership, but there were no signs of any financial impropriety here. The network is a perennial money-loser and its new owner will keep all its obligations.
• Ownership reorganization at The Score and Outdoor Life Network
• bpm:tv can now add infomercials to its schedule

And finally, not that anyone doubted it would happen, but the CRTC has allowed CBC Television and Télévision Radio-Canada to continue to operate for another year.

Related Posts

• CRTC Roundup: The American retransmission consent model
• CRTC Roundup: Global, porn and death
• Broadcasting regulation nerdgasm
• CRTC roundup: Videotron doesn’t want to closed-caption porn
• Specialty channel war is screwing customers

Last year, these games aired on RDS.

The schedule includes two other games involving Concordia University, but no others involving McGill.

Which is as it should be because the Redmen suck.

Go Stingers!

Related Posts

• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Strong winds out west
• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Bye-Bye 2010: Redemption
• Just call him MiCam

The broadcast schedule for this year's Impact games has come out, and it's exactly the same as last year:

• Radio-Canada will broadcast nine home games and one away game, as well as all playoff games
• CKAC and the Team 990 will broadcast all 15 home games, two Canadian Championship games at Saputo Stadium (against the Vancouver Whitecaps and Toronto FC) as well as all playoff games

Both press releases talk about how the Impact has become more mainstream in Montreal and has attracted a lot of fans, especially thanks to its CONCACAF Champions League run this year.

But the news is still disappointing to me. None of the broadcasters has increased its commitment, and none of them will be broadcasting regular-season away games (besides the one on RadCan). Choosing only to broadcast home games during the regular season no doubt saves a lot of money, but it sounds pretty half-assed.

So for another season, Impact fans who want to catch away games will be forced to fork over money watch it online for free at USLLive.com

Related Posts

• Team 990, RadCan to air Impact games
• Radio ratings: A good fall for Cogeco and CKGM
• CKAC Circulation 730: First impressions
• Government pays for Cogeco to shut down CKAC Sports
• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running

600 at Sun Media

100 at Rogers

105 at CTV, plus another 118 at A-Channel

In an environment where about one journalist in six in Canada has lost their job, that number just got a lot worse. CBC/Radio-Canada announced 800 job cuts today (about half split between the two sides to maintain political correctness) as part of an effort to balance a $171-million budget deficit. Even then, most of the money will come not from job cuts but from sales of assets (CBC owns quite a bit of land, for example, including the Maison Radio-Canada downtown, which it is hoping to convert into condos) and other vaguely-described programming cuts. Senior executives' salaries are also being reduced by 20%.

Some statistics:

• 393 cuts in English services, 336 cuts in French services, 70 cuts at the corporate level
• 80% of cuts will come at the network level, 20% at regions. The CBC says it won't shut down any regional stations
• 17% of cuts are in radio, 83% in television. No plans to introduce advertising on CBC Radio, and the television schedule is to remain "largely intact" with no additional U.S. programming

Perhaps most telling, the CBC's Hubert Lacroix said the network wants to transition "from being a TV provider to a provider of video content" (and similarly for radio). Not quite sure what that means exactly, but it sounds nice, doesn't it?

Related Posts

• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Tou.tv: Menace to society?
• A Mary Christmas
• Battle of the MS Paint
• CBC funeral lacks names to mourn

Caroline Allard has been busy. The blogueuse-vedette known as the Mère Indigne who turned her blog about parenting into a book was on Tout le monde en parle Sunday night and Christianne Charette Monday morning talking about the sequel to the book and a new online video series on radio-canada.ca that launched Monday night starring Marie-Hélène Thibault. (The fact that these are all part of the Radio-Canada family is a coincidence, I'm sure.)

You can also see a video interview with Allard on the series website, as well as a short piece explaining the series.

Unfortunately, Radio-Canada is using Microsoft Silverlight for its video, which meant I had to install that software and then switch from Firefox to Safari in order to see it. Is Flash-based video still too difficult? Or Quicktime? Or YouTube?

Related Posts

• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Strong winds out west
• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Bye-Bye 2010: Redemption
• Just call him MiCam

The Minister of Transport today released a list of intersections in Quebec where photo radars will be installed to catch people running red lights.

Radio-Canada did the obvious thing with it: creating a Google map.

These kinds of things are much more useful than lists, as I learned when I created a Google map of dangerous overpasses last year.

Related Posts

• Overpass inspections complete
• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Strong winds out west
• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Two weathertudes

Related Posts

• Want to watch me talk in front of a brick wall for half an hour?
• CBC gets to keep some analog TV running
• Strong winds out west
• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Bye-Bye 2010: Redemption

The new Pulse ... err, CFCF ... err, CTV Montreal website

It's not even that we made fun of CFCF's website for how bad it was, how it looked like it hadn't been redesigned since the 90s (actually, its last redesign was in 2004, but that wasn't much better than its 90s look). It's that it was so bad it was completely off the radar. You couldn't link to news stories because there was no archival system for them. Forget Web 2.0, it wasn't even Web 1.0.

Well, some of that's changed now. CTV has rolled out new websites for all its local stations, including CFCF in Montreal. It includes crazy Web 1.0 features like having individual stories on their own pages, links to wire stories, and individual pages for special features. The weather page has actual graphics from the show and even an embedded video of the latest local forecast (which for some reason is done exclusively for the web instead of just taking video from the latest newscast). It's even got an RSS feed, and the video player is improved (it's embedded instead of being a popup).

Looking for crap? Well they have that too. The community calendar page and lotteries page both have that vintage 90s feel to them. The traffic page is nothing but links to Transport Quebec highway cameras.

If you're expecting bleeding-edge features like the ability to comment on stories, sadly you're out of luck. They point you to a contact form if you want to comment on a story. But they include handy Facebook and Digg links, so you can comment on the story on someone else's website. There's hints of a mobile site, but apparently that's available for every local station except Montreal.

Melissa Wheeler continues the tradition of hot web reporters

The About Us page includes bios of all the "personalities", which now (finally) include Daniele Hamamdjian and Maya Johnson, as well as this Melissa Wheeler person, who I'm sure is doing the best she can with this antiquated technology. They also list important executives like Barry Wilson and Jed Kahane.

Radio-Canada redesigned

RadCan also rolled its new design into service recently. It's apparently to spotlight audio and video (which, coincidentally, is what RadCan is all about), but the audio and video player is just as crappy as it was before, mainly because it's still based on Windows Media instead of Flash.

Related Posts

• Hi Daniele
• Alouettes parade to get live coverage on TV
• Inside CFCF 12
• CTV wants you to help save [insert local station name here]
• CFCF cancels morning newscast, lays off three