RDS’s HD channel launched today with the first regular-season game of the Canadiens (we won, by the way). The network plans over 1,000 hours of HD programming in the first year (an average of 3 hours a day for us idiots who can’t do basic math), including full HD coverage of the entire Habs season and playoffs.
The channel is available on:
NHL fans with digital cable rejoice: The NHL Network has its annual fall free preview until October 31. (Channel 110 on Videotron Illico, 421 on ExpressVu and 465 on StarChoice)
For the unfamiliar, NHL Network is a TSN-run station that carries nothing but NHL hockey coverage, with classic games, analysis shows, highlight reels and game recaps (with “NHL on the Fly”, the recaps happen as the games are still going on). It includes everything you’d expect from such a network, except for live games.
Unfortunately, the NHL Network is a victim of exclusivity contracts. First comes CBC with Saturday night Leafs games and most of the playoffs, then comes TSN with major games during the week and the rest of the playoff games. Then comes Rogers SportsNet with games in their markets (Senators, Flames, Oilers and Canucks) and by the time they’re done NHL Network is left with about 40 games in the entire season, of which none involves a Canadian team.
So remind me again why anyone would pay to have this channel on their lineup?
Anyway, enjoy the free preview.
UPDATE (Dec. 1): The network is apparently getting some success in the U.S., which is making some down there wonder how many die-hards there really are.
I just finished watching the last few minutes of the long-awaited first episode of Dominic Arpin‘s new show Vlog (auto-play video warning) on TVA. (Forgive me, I was watching a lot of Family Guy and American Dad on Fox and forgot all about it.)
The point of the show is simple: Arpin and co-host Geneviève Borne (who makes a rather unconvincing web geek if you ask me) present clips from videos they find online.
You’ll remember a few months back when ABC launched iCaught, a similar show which was supposed to find the “stories behind the videos“. I was highly critical of the show for various reasons (mainly because it sucked). Most of the mistakes are repeated in Vlog, but thankfully to a much lesser degree:
As you can imagine, a show like this should have a very involved website. In visiting it, I got nothing but frustration (and since most people will visit the website right after the first show, first impressions are everything):
target=_blank is bad enough, but this is just stupid.
Like iCaught, Vlog isn’t content (pun!) taking its material from YouTube’s most viewed videos list. It also wants you, the viewer, to provide them with content. In their first episode, they ask viewers to submit their best lip-sync to Mes Aieux’s Dégenération (I’ll spare you the English subtitles). Is it just me, or is this the lamest type of video people can produce? On very rare occasions such videos can be downright entertaining, but most people make fun of it unless you put in a lot of effort.
But feel free to do so, send them your videos. Oh, according to their giant give-us-all-your-rights contract, they can then use the video, free of charge, in any media over and over again forever and ever throughout the universe. And if it’s shown that the video contains copyrighted material (say, including audio of a complete pop song without the artist’s permission first), then you agree to pay any damages.
You’ve been warned.
So that’s what I think of Vlog. What about you?
Elsewhere in the blogosphere:
Did you know we live in a plutocracy?
Michel Brûlé knows it. He knows the big Quebec media is out to get real Quebecers. La Presse is friends with Jean Charest, Radio-Canada is “radio propaganda”, CBC has Don Cherry.
And more importantly, English Canadians are in bed with U.S. Americans because we watch their TV shows and we’re pro-war or something.
Oh, and we’re under control of “U.S. feminists”, who have convinced Quebec’s women that they have to go after all men, when in fact it’s just the English-speaking ones who are oppressing them. (He insists, meanwhile, that objectifying women is OK because he finds them very pretty — but only in ads for sex shops, not beer.) He also says Quebec women are too stupid to realize the need for Quebec independence to free it from the English Canadians, because they only voted 45% yes in the 1995 referendum while men voted 55% yes.
This is what he explains, in his opening videos (which I can’t link to*) to Les Dents du Québec.TV, his new citizen media website.
His thesis: (French) Quebec men and women must band together and end the battle of the sexes so they can fight their real enemy: the English language.
I’m all for citizen media, and giving people the right to express the opinion that the French language is endangered in this province. And his point about how much American TV we watch concerns me as well.
But I’d take him a bit more seriously if most of his ideas didn’t make him look like the other side of the Reform Party coin.
* Seriously folks, what’s with all these video sites that don’t allow people to link directly to the videos? That’s not even Web 2.0, it’s the kind of bone-headedly simple hyperlink technology that gave birth to the Internet in the first place.
CanWest News Service’s Randy Boswell has a story about the man behind the mask of artist Ken Danby‘s famous painting of a hockey goalie, now that Danby has died.
What’s interesting about the story is how seriously it takes itself, compared to the amount of journalism behind it.
The lead:
“The goalie depicted in At the Crease, the iconic painting by late Canadian artist Ken Danby, has finally been unmasked.”
It seems groundbreaking. Like Woodward and Bernstein, an epic feat of investigative journalism.
“Now, with an assist from none other than hockey great Wayne Gretzky, CanWest News Service has unlocked the secret.”
This sentence is misleading: Gretzky didn’t assist, he told Boswell who it is:
This week, following Danby’s death, CanWest News Service asked Gretzky, now the coach of the Phoenix Coyotes, if he would reveal the model’s identity.
“Dennis Kemp is the name of the goalie,” came the reply from a Coyotes spokesman.
In other words, now that Danby is dead, Boswell called Gretzky up (err… called his spokesperson up) and asked if he would reveal the name, and he did.
Is this supposed to be what investigative journalism is nowadays? Well, perhaps I’m being too tough. After all, identifying someone is the easy part. But getting his story is another matter entirely.
Oh wait:
“One mystery about the painting still lingers. Despite scores of phone calls to Kemp families across Ontario, CanWest News Service has been unable, so far, to locate Dennis Kemp.”
So much for that. The goalie has been unmasked, but nobody can find him.
UPDATE (Oct. 13): The Guelph Mercury tracked him down in Lethbridge. Meanwhile, Danby’s son insists there wasn’t a single model for the painting.
The CRTC has approved two big media ownership changes:
Astral Media, owners of The Movie Network, Teletoon, Astral Photo, and lots of radio stations in Quebec and Atlantic Canada including the Énergie (CKMF 94.3) and Rock Détente (CITE 107.3) networks, will take over Standard Broadcasting, which owns stations in Western Canada, but also three English Montreal stations — CHOM 97.7, CJAD-800 and CJFM Mix 96. Montreal is the only market where there’s any overlap, and even then they work in two different languages.
Rogers (telecom, Maclean’s, Rogers Sportsnet, OMNI and 51 radio stations) will buy Citytv (5 stations in Toronto and Western Canada) after CTVglobemedia (Globe and Mail, CTV, TSN/RDS, Discovery Channel Canada, Comedy Network, MuchMusic, Bravo! Canada, A-Channel, your first-born child) was ordered to divest itself of the competing TV network in its acquisition of CHUM Ltd.
More details in this Wikipedia article.
Neither decision is particularly bad for competition in Canada. The radio deal involves two companies that weren’t really competing, and the TV deal gives Rogers a foot in the door to network television.
Of course, it’s the deals that preceded these that are cause for concern. The fact that CHOM and Mix 96, which should be highly-competitive stations, are owned by the same company is troublesome. And CTV’s takeover of CHUM was ushered through without any apparent concern that their mega cable channel powerhouse has only gotten bigger. It now includes, for example, two all-news stations: CTV NewsNet and City’s CP24, which for some insane reason they were not required to sell off as part of Citytv.
Alexandre points out this blog post saying that journalist blogs are pointless, mainly because they can’t offer anything new besides what they write in the paper, and they can’t be free to write whatever they want.
Allow me to disagree. Blogs come in all sorts of different types, but most can be broken down into two broad categories:
Most journalist blogs (and, for that matter, this one) fall in between. Like newspaper columnists, they relate personal experiences to professional issues.
But not all journalist blogs are the same. Some have behind-the-stories stories, some are more personal, and some aggregate anything of interest to a particular niche. It’s the latter type that tends to be the most successful, creating a community for people interested in a particular subject. Blogs like Habs Inside/Out make use of journalists’ access to get the kinds of stories no non-journalist blog can provide.
In the end, there’s nothing inherent about blogs by journalists that make them more or less useful than the rest. In either case, interesting, frequently-updated blogs of high-quality will win out.
The Canadian Newspaper Association is planning a media campaign to remind people who read newspapers that they should be reading newspapers.
Aside from the redundant stupidity of putting ads promoting newspapers in newspapers, is this really necessary? Newspapers aren’t like toilet paper, you don’t go into a grocery store and pick out a newspaper subscription because you recognize the brand. People subscribe or unsubscribe based on the quality over a long period of time.
Instead of spending money to advertise in your own papers, maybe you should spend it hiring journalists to find good stories and editors to collect them and present them without all those glaring typos.
UPDATE (Oct. 9): Transmission Marketing agrees with me that this is preaching to the converted.
Well, today is the big day. The New Toronto National Post hit doorsteps across the GTA nation today, with an Amazing New Redesign That Changes Everything. They’ve been advertising it in their paper and others for days now, so I was really excited to see what Canada’s Most Pretentious Newspaper did with itself:
It put its flag down the side. That’s about it.
Calling it a “bold, new design“, the new Post keeps the same headline fonts, same body text font, same flag design (though rotated 90 degrees) and the same elements.
Of course, why should they fix something that isn’t broken? The National Post “earned 38 international design awards from the Society of Newspaper Design (sic), approximately twice the number of any other English-language Canadian newspaper.” — Translation: We beat the Globe and Star, but lost to La Presse.
The only other noticeable design changes are a slight increase in font size, a very noticeable (I might even say excessive) increase in leading (Torontoist has comparison pictures), and a few other so-hard-to-see-that-I-can’t-see-them changes.
The “redesign” also comes with editorial changes, most of which are vaguely described:
As part of its Big Launch, the Post even managed to get one of Canada’s TV news networks to do a two-minute package glorifying it. Go ahead, guess which one. If you answered “the one they own”, you’re right.
The Post is seeking comments on its blog. Perhaps I can use the comment feature to get them to stop making crappy videos of talking reporter heads awkwardly reading the articles they just wrote that morning.
Radio-Canada reports on a protest today against extending Cavendish Boulevard to Toupin, but apparently confuses it with the extension of Cavendish into Cote-Saint-Luc.
It’s a simple mistake to make, and almost understandable, but it’s still not what they’re protesting.
A mini storm is brewing at Concordia University over a subject so stupid I can’t believe there are actually two sides to it: student union councillors don’t want their public meetings videotaped for public broadcast, despite mandating it at the previous meeting.
A little history here. Many moons ago, Concordia University Television was founded as Canada’s first university-based television station. It doesn’t have a television broadcasting license, nor is it on cable anywhere. Instead, it has monitors on a closed-circuit system throughout the university, mainly in the downtown Hall Building.
Somewhere in the 1990s, the Concordia Student Union (which was still concerned with that “democracy” thing and hadn’t yet been taken over by the moderate/radical or Israeli/Palestinian political divides, each bent on using political corruption to eliminate the other and stay in power at any cost) had the bright idea that, because nobody cared about what they did, they should get the word out more. So they mandated (read: required) CUTV to film their meetings and “broadcast” them to students. But because of technical limitations at CUTV, this never happened. And with the inevitable turnover on both sides, this rule was eventually forgotten.
Fast-forward to this spring. CUTV station manager Jason Gondziola wins a seat on the CSU Council of Representatives, somehow believing that being a student politician and running a student media outlet does not present an inherent conflict of interest. He immediately starts lobbying for permission for CUTV to start filming meetings. Over the past few years, the station has been using student money to buy lots of new equipment and is distributing some videos via its website.
But CSU councillors, specifically John Molson School of Business councillor Catherine Côté, who apparently have no idea what politics mean, are concerned about their privacy. In some cases in the past, it’s been Muslim women on Council who didn’t want their faces exposed. Ditto some paranoid anarchists. I’m not sure who it is now, but I’m certain it’s either an idiot or someone who is trying to hide from constituents.
Student politicians are almost by definition stupid. It’s not their fault. They’re learning how to become real politicians. This means that, for example, their political dirty tricks are a lot more transparent (illegally paying campaign workers, bribing, appointing partisan hacks to electoral and judicial positions, etc.).
But it boggles the mind that a student politician, who has run in an election and appeared on hundreds of posters and thousands of ballots, would cite privacy concerns as a reason to prevent journalists from recording the public proceedings of the most important student-run body at Concordia, responsible for a budget of over a million dollars. The fact that Councillor Côté did so after the fact, using the excuse that the issue should be revisited because she couldn’t be bothered to show up to the previous meeting and should be given a chance to express her views, is the height of arrogance.
The Link agrees, calling her an “enemy of transparency”.
She, and the entire CSU Council, should be ashamed.
No, no no! Can’t they see he was just drunk driving as a cover? To keep the terrorists from
realizing his true motives? He didn’t have any choice. There wasn’t any time.
Now he’s lost a whole three episodes sitting in jail. And the 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. part is the most interesting.
The Hamilton Spectator is “going local”. I’m not quite sure what that means exactly, but good for them.
One of the plans as part of its “going local” strategy is remaking its A2 and A3 pages. In most newspapers, these are the continuations of major stories off the front page. But the Spectator is going to make them into local news pages, probably with some sort of fixed layout.
Lots of newspapers make plans like these. A2 will always look like this, A3 will always look like this, the front page will always have this kind of layout.
The problem is that as soon as a huge story happens (say, an election or a local school shooting), about half the A section gets turned into coverage of that story, and these rules start flying out the window. Eventually, the first few pages start reverting to their previous habits: turns of unrelated front-page stories jammed in together with second-rate top news stories that didn’t make the cover.
Why bother fighting it? The A section is about news. Almost by definition it’s the section that you can plan the least in advance because you won’t know what kind of news you have until you have it. Give it the fluidity it needs, because otherwise it’s going to find a way to sneak in.
Yves Williams has a YouTube video of Infoman Jean-René Dufort saying we need to destroy Facebook. As if it somehow furthers that point, he created a profile for wanted murderer Sylvain Vincent and got Justin Trudeau to add him as a friend.
I guess we shouldn’t take Mr. Dufort too seriously, since his Facebook profile has almost 100 “friends” as well.
UPDATE (Sept. 26): Jean-René Dufort… Dominic Arpin… seduction… leather…
I’d never heard of it before, but apparently Corus Entertainment runs a songwriting competition every year called Canadian Radio Star. It awards $10,000 in cash and a bunch of smaller prizes to one Canadian act.
And based on the Photoshopped clip art on the site’s homepage, you apparently also win Finger Eleven. (Is that just a one-night thing or can you, like, sell them into slavery?)
I’ve never been one for contests of creativity. They always seem more about a big company getting a cheap source of new ideas than they are about encouraging independent talent.
Here’s the skinny from the contest’s rules:
I know some artists are so desperate to get signed they’ll do just about anything, but it just doesn’t seem fair to me to work for free hoping that some stations will play a song you won’t get paid for. Especially when the grand prize is only $10,000. Surely a song good enough to win a national songwriting competition is worth more than a measly $10,000.
Am I just being cynical? Maybe. Maybe it’s just that horrible clip art graphic that’s getting to me.
