It is now 1:46,
so I'm going to suggest that we do start.
So I will, if you don't mind, just do a quick kind of overview of some
of the broad ideas behind some of the public service media, especially with
regard to CBC and the idea of platforms.
So I want to talk about, in a sense, this kind of, what I would say is, well,
I'll call it digitization and universalism in public service media.
And I've been working on some of the ideas around this for a few years.
And it really came to a head a couple of years ago from a conference,
the RIPE conference, which is a conference that looks at the sort of state of
public service media around the world.
And in 2018, a number of people actually gathered
together to gather in Madrid, Spain, and were hosted by
the Spanish public service media RTVE and also by the University of Nevarra.
And the idea was that there was a, kind of a start of a discussion about the nature of
public service media, and in particular, the ways in which there were new dynamics
and perspectives emerging.
And in a sense, there were two questions that I've used to, sort of from that event, for
me to sort of follow through and do some research in terms of,
you know, what is happening in terms of platforms and different digital forms.
So the first question was to what degree do different public service media, digital forms
and platforms and their attempted content development and distribution respect the
diversity of unique affordances provided through public service media?
And it's,
so doing question two, how do public service media maintain sufficient degrees of cohesion,
trustworthiness, fairness, and inclusion that it remained universalist
obligation of public service media?
In a sense, there, it's this idea of
the degree to which different platforms, different forms of digitization, different ways of distributing
and experiencing public service
still reach to a broad group of people who are producing
media, but also to the various audiences and communities around public service
media.
And by the way, it's great to see Liz there, hi Liz,
and Liz of course, was involved in that conference a few years back at the
University of Nevarra.
So just as an overview, I'll make some remarks about the idea that
really, since the start of telephony and wireless radio wave communication, and by the way,
I'm at the point of finally getting around to read Mark Raboy's book about,
you know, the development of radio, and sort of at the beginning of
what allowed for public service media, and
but to look at the percent of universal service has legitimated the ownership and
operation of media as a public trust.
Indeed.
The sense for not for profit and public service communication was taken up by a majority
of the population in most countries and often given political heft from a number of
community-based organizations, including farmers, workers, students, immigrants, and different
language communities.
And some of us have done that research around that sort of background.
You know, the fact that in places like Saskatchewan, the union of farmers
were big supporters of public media, public radio, as it was
first emerging especially in the 30s.
So, a lot of communities involved in what is being done in traditionally within public
service media. Until the 1980s, this principle was a bedrock for the broadcasting mission,
and it's still a mandatory requirement for public media companies today, from CBC in
Canada, the BBC in the UK, ABC Australia, NHK, Japan, et cetera, et cetera.
But in practice we were discussing back then and still discuss it,
the universalism ideal was somewhat abandoned, some
would say largely abandoned in the 1980s as
media deregulation promised more competition, innovation, and vigorous economic growth,
and the beginning of multi-platforms quite frankly. My colleague and coauthor
of the collection of papers that came out of that conference, so that's Dr.
Greg Lowe, pointed out that growing distress in
media today is partly rooted in the illusion
that more media and more platforms would inevitably ensure better media in all platforms.
And he went on to argue that there is now more of everything on offer, except social
responsibility.
So in that co-edited book through the RIPE initiative, universities and public service
media,
We worked through with our colleagues, including some of you to interrogate the historical
universalism mission in public service broadcasting and explore its contemporary relevance for
public service media, including the CBC, at least two articles
on the CBC.
Finally, just to say, another person who's been a big part of that RIPE group,
that's done a lot of research in this area, is British scholar Peter Goodwin,
who argues that the increasingly pervasive distribution of content over the internet
has largely undone the principle of geographical universality and mixed genre, general channels
are no longer, very popular due to the proliferation of niche options that undermine the universality
of appeal.
A universality universalism has fallen out of favour in part because it is
less achievable.
It seems that the idea of multi channel, multi distribution points, would suggest
that this is something that's universal, but there may be lacking as a result,
through niche kind of audiences, a place of some level of universal debate and conversation.
And that's probably, it will be also tied to a, kind of, I would say a political
fragmentation that may also be happening in a number of countries.
So don't want to spend too much time, further talking about that,
but the idea was that we had hoped in writing some of the articles and publishing
those that we were able to provide a timely discourse on the universalism mission well
into the 21st century and making a case for continuing relevance while acknowledging an
enormous range and degree of complication for actually putting this mission in practice.
So, far from being irrelevant,
one could argue that the mission for public service media has both ethical
and instrumental importance still today.
So, with that as a, kind of a general introduction, a fairly broad overview, let's then
move to talk to some of the ideas that have been shared, are being shared as
well.
So I'm just trying to make sure that I have... So Miles is here.
And I think, Miles, you were going to speak to living online
platformization and the CBC, and I understand you have two coauthors for some of this.
I do have two coauthors, and I'll I'll start with paper.
So good afternoon.
This brief talk is derived from research initiated by Dr. David Skinner and executed
in cooperation with Dr.
Amanda Oye and myself.
I'll outline our research into CBC and platforms.
We define platforms as digital intermediaries, two-sided or multi-sided digital infrastructures,
providing opportunities for different parties to interact,
including Spotify, Netflix, iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Our research employs a critical political economic approach to communication concerned
with how political and economic forces enable and constrain the allocation, production,
distribution, and consumption of social resources.
In this case, CBC's communicated resources, attentive to how platforms are ideal for data
extraction in today's economy.
This paper highlights the political and economic context of CBC's platform activities,
identifying how decisions to allocate resources to platform based activities impact CBC's
engagements with users. Van Couvering presents platforms as two-sided or sometimes multi-sided
markets. In this sense, traditional print and
broadcast media might be seen as two-sided
and that they bring advertisers and audience members together.
Contemporary internet-based sites that facilitate network relations between users, advertisers,
and content producers like CBC can be seen as multi-sided. A key element of platforms,
of a platform's
value is its capacity for information collection, useful for developing advertising markets
and for directing users' attention to particular content.
The dominance of transnational media platforms has presented a number of challenges to CBC.
Expanding media choices compete for audiences' attention, and various platforms gather user
information to curate content.
This complicates CBC's abilities to access and
develop audiences.
We sought to better understand the dimensions of these challenges, asking what are the dimensions
of CBC's platformization, how does CBC use third-party platforms?
What opportunities do they offer users, and what are CBC's policies regarding platformization,
and how do they relate to its mandate?
So I'll first identify some key moments in CBC's extension online
And then I'll overview some of CBC's own platforms, as well as its use of third
party platforms.
So CBC has been online since their involvement with Teletext and Telidon in the early eighties.
By the nineties, cbc.ca came to be an umbrella for radio, television, and news world sites.
The 1995 mandate review committee pointed to the special role public agencies might
take in developing content for the emerging digital world. By the nineties'
missed budget cuts and layoffs, CBC's president Beatty identified new media as a
core
function. In 1997, CBC launched their galaxy digital
music channel. The following year, CBC news,
online integrated CBC radio, television, and news world into a single site. In 1999, CBC
committed 2% of budget to online services.
In 2006, CBC informed the Heritage Committee.
They were a platform neutral content provider and distributor best suited to complementing
the efforts of private broadcast.
As expressed by Heritage in 2008 by the government in 2010, CBC should maximize their presence
on all digital platforms.
And by 2012, the LPIF and the migration of advertising dollars online put pressure
on CBC to fill local news and public affairs gaps,
and CBC responded by intensifying online services in part with a website in Hamilton. 2012 also
brought CBC music in 2014, amidst grievances from private media companies facing shrinking
revenues, and looking towards 2020, CBC explicitly prioritized digital technologies over conventional
radio and TV.
Despite liberal reinvestment in 2016, the corporation maintained prioritization of mobile
and online delivery for local services.
The government's 2017 Creative Canada report aligned CBC's multi-platform presence with
their mandate protect, projecting to showcase the best of Canada to the world and to reflect
the country's diversity on multiple platforms.
And to quote, the sentiment was echoed in 2019,
amidst the legislative review where CBC demanded
assurance and had the flexibility to determine, quote, the most appropriate platform and delivery
mechanisms to serve Canadians.
And again, during the license renewal hearings, president Tait advocated for a platform neutral
approach to counting PNI. CBC has its own platform.
CBC's online network presence includes the news and public affairs dominated cbc.ca
as well as CBC Music and Gem, their video streaming
service launched in 2018.
cbc.ca is a public affairs focused website.
It's largely two-sided, delivering audiences to banner ads in text and pre-roll advertisements
for videos. In 2012,
CBC began licensing content to websites, including Yahoo and Huffington post, to the express
concern of the established press. As private news organizations
erected paywalls, CBC remained free, and complaints became more vocal.
CBC Music launched amidst budget cuts in 2012. Despite
CBC's promotion of CBC music as a public service, their plan called for this platform to be
supported through the sale of advertising.
The CBC music service also offers
what would it amount to traditional print media with banner ads, online and video content,
as well as CBC radio streams and curated playlists with pre-roll and spot advertisements.
CBC launched the Gem video streaming site in 2018, posting hours of live, on-demand
content
for free. Gem is accessible as an app and available at cbc.ca
gem and available
on Apple TV and Chromecast, granting payment-free access to CBC's current TV catalog,
which is mostly ad-supported. As well as CBC TV
feeds
and the Olympic channel, Gem also offers over a hundred feature films, Canadian feature
films ad-free. 4.99 a month removes ads from on-demand content and enables streaming of
CBC news with network 24/7.
But the live stream still contains ads, as they are essentially mirrors of what's
being broadcast.
And in that case, Gem supplements aired advertisements with streaming national
ads.
So limitations placed on the distribution of programming developed for Gem display
the constraining effects of CBC's private partnerships. CBC Kids' Dino Ranch,
a cartoon produced with Disney, for instance, premiered on Gem in January,
but the show is conveniently absent from the Disney plus streaming service.
The distributed influence of CBC's relatively secret corporate agreements conflict
with CBC's multi-platform development in the name of public service.
Online media's intensified capacity for data collection exposes the conflict of public
interest and profit-oriented motives animating CBC. While CBC aligns data with
the
history of pursuing audience feedback to become about better public broadcaster,
CBC also admits that advertisers are willing to pay more to reach targeted audiences.
So just a little bit on CBC's platform
networking: CBC has used independent platforms for a variety of reasons, including content
distribution. By 2013,
for instance, CBC was the primary Canadian contributor to Netflix.
CBC became a pilot program for podcasting in spring 2005 and began to produce original
podcasts in 2015.
Most of their English language radio shows have a podcast on iTunes.
They also use Spotify.
CBC is well-represented at the app store, the four pillars of their presence being CBC
News, CBC Gem, CBC Listen, and CBC Sports.
Each app delivers audiences to advertisers to various degrees based on the services offered.
And in April 2021, very recently, CBC launched Mauril, I believe it's called,
an official language teaching app sponsored directly by Canadian Heritage.
CBC's 2010 corporate plan
first identified enhanced social media as a strategic objective.
Since then, CBC has accumulated 159 English language Twitter pages. On Facebook, the CBC's
news page is its most popular. Some shows see Facebook pages offer content to supplement
aired programming. CBC's Facebook content is
streamed without advertisements.
CBC also makes modest use of Snapchat Discover and Instagram.
So when CBC uses independent platforms to promote and distribute their product, the
network, to its chagrin, lacks access to at least some of the data acquired by platforms
about user activity.
President Tait identified data collection as the key arena for cultural sovereignty
in 2019.
It's very unlikely that CBC is data poor.
And it's important to note that we don't know how much and which data CBC is getting on
a given platform.
In any case, CBC's express goal to drive interest and user engagement with customized content
reflects the value of platform networking for interfacing users and content producers,
as well as interfacing youth audiences and advertisers.
So by way of some kind of concluding remark, CBC continues to bestride the public and
private elements of the broadcasting system.
Online platformization complicates CBC's situation. User data, valuable as a tool for tailoring
audiences for advertisers, is pursued in the name of the public interest.
Furthermore, the multi-sided relations of users, advertisers, and content producers,
including the public broadcaster enabled by platformization, remain obscured--
remain obscured as the allocation of media properties, data, and advertising are not
subject
to full public disclosure.
CBC, for instance, does not report on social media earnings and annual or quarterly reports,
nor do they disclose their agreements with co-producers who are operating platforms
of their own.
And one final comment is that CBC's online activities are shaped by policies, including
terms of use, privacy, copyright, journalistic standards and practices, as well as policies
about user-generated content.
And these policies are available.
They are public, but online activities are also shaped by CBC's practice of collecting
cookies, packets of user data, used to track and identify user behavior.
And I think all of these factors are right for discussion as well.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
That is an extraordinary overview of, some of the developments, and there's
a sense that the change of paradigm for a public broadcaster in Canada. We've
got a couple of minutes.
If anyone else wants to just jump in, any of
the panelists want to jump in and
raise any observations that they have?
Not hearing anyone jumping in.
Thanks so much, Miles, and we will now go to Lizzie Jackson, who can,
who also is able to tell us a little bit about her research with CBC.
Can you see that?
So I just have to find it.
Great, okay. So this is part of a large study that took about three years, finished
in 2019. I was funded by the Polish Science Foundation because
they wanted to support, it was the last action they did before they were taken over,
really, by the government.
And they wanted to fund a study to ensure the future that looked at what was
necessary to ensure the independence and future of the Polish public service
media.
So what came out of it?
I did it with Michał Głowacki from the University of Warsaw,
and we looked at 10 cities, high technology cities, to see where things were going in
media and communications, and also critically internal organizational systems, particularly
in the light of the increase of datafication.
And we wanted to look at whether the public service media, the closest in proximity
public service media was engaging with the high technology clusters. High technology
clusters
are like Silicon Valley, or as is in Austin, and of course there's a huge,
many clusters in Toronto.
So this is a presentation from the Canadian clusters, particularly
in Toronto, but also along the corridor from Waterloo to Toronto, looking at high
technology clusters and what makes them different, what makes them work,
but also critically, how can that help public service media?
And I argue that to be seen and heard is to be, you have to be datafied now to be seen
and heard.
So I looked at, obviously CBC was the closest in proximity public
service media in Toronto,
but also Hamilton and Waterloo.
And datafication, I argue, enables multi-way recombinatry delivery
to many audiences, segments of audiences, as you wish, over, you know, when you like
it, what you want, when you want, how you want it to large, medium, and small screens.
And what the media is, is immaterial; as long as it's tagged and datafied
and is data, but to use those sorts of systems, you have to have internal
organizational systems that support such data flows and also relationships with external,
technologists and a wider range of creatives.
So what we could see, Michał and I could see,
when we look back at the literature and the history, and it's amazing, this is recent
history.
It's interesting how Miles was talking about, you know, 2012, you know, intensifying
local news gaps, 2016, prioritizing digital and talking about, you know,
the most appropriate platform-neutral approaches, you know, 2017, 2018.
There's so recent, really.
But there's been a tremendous ramping up of this disruption, and I just wanted
to bring out some of the sorts of theoretical aspects, if you like, of what,
what we saw was, is happening.
So you get Castells and Terranova
talking about the digitization of objects. So the digitalization, the
move from analog to digital, which was an uncomfortable time, and people felt
rather threatened,
and didn't really realize, you know, there weren't the systems to use the
data.
We were really just talking about better quality, you know, high definition, not, or, you
know, so linear media, legacy media, as some people call it.
But I think legacy media isn't over yet, but the digitalization to basically
improve the quality and play out on different devices. Then we get some datafication, which
is really, once you've digitized your programming or your news site item, or your piece of text,
or your objects, whatever it might be,
then that's inputted into databases for sorting and retrieval.
And you have to have, obviously, people who understand databases and people who understand
taxonomies and filing and cloud computing and parsing
data around from and reusing it in different ways.
And Nick Couldry has written a lot on that.
And now we're moving into the post-digital, which is the blending of the analog and
digital as in the internet of things.
And you can, for example, you could be sitting in a sports stadium watching the
broadcast in the interval, you know, and you could also be looking at the the
scores on your mobile phone and perhaps even on your headset, listening to the radio commentary
of what you've just seen.
So I think we're moving into the fourth industrial revolution, which Floridi talks
about, where everything's very fluid and nothing,
you can have aggregation of content, but we're not really so much talking about channels
now.
We're talking about getting data to people in the way that they want it.
If we are totally datafied, and we've got fantastic storytellers working
with programmers and working with data analysts to analyze the data
use.
Then we're starting to get nearer to what Karel Jacubowicz argued, well,
his vision for public service media 3.0, which he envisioned in 2010, which has an ability
to operate at national and international levels, to reflect multiculturalism because you
can have segments of the audience who either indicated
they like particular things, or the public service media could say, if you like this,
you like this.
So this supports multi-mediality and also texts and paratext, so you can have
a David Attenborough film and then you have paratext, which could be various
elements of different commentaries, different photographs, different ways
of experiencing that the original texts which could suit
disabled people or people who might need a bit more explanation or simpler technology
to view on.
So this brings us to using datafication for universal access.
Not necessarily universal appeal, but it also might enhance the universal appeal as well
as universal access.
And this approach is obviously, could, if you get it right, you can be technologically
neutral.
So I wanted to talk about the interoperable mastering format, which is a
new
broadcast standard.
It came from the film industry, very much adopted
by Netflix in 2016,
and it's been adopted a lot in, you know, Los Angeles,
you know, the big filmmaker centres of film production, but it's basically, you
put into a container all the components of a particular brand or a particular media
or communications to experience into a big box.
And it's all been mapped with metadata instructions and it can be pulled out in different
ways.
So you could have an airline version of David Attenborough's The Blue Planet.
You could have a mobile phone version, you could have a television version, you could
have a gamified version, and you could have different commentary for different
territories, different age groups, different segments.
I know in Canada last, the broadcasting is quite, you know, needs to
be quite segmented, to appeal to different types of groups and different languages.
So this is how it works.
You have inputs on the left, you can see all the videos, subtitles, artwork, metadata,
gaming, whatever you want to put in.
And then it's mastered so that everything is crunched together in different types of
bundles of assets to suit the play out.
It's trans coded, and then it's outputted
in it's various different streams.
When I worked at BBC R&D, I worked next to the iPlayer team in the early days
of the iPlayer,
they got to the point where they were recoding and transcoding for up to 36 different
screens devices,
just receiving devices,
and it was just taking so much time.
So I think in the same way media flows can be recombined,
audiences can also be recombined.
They can be segmented, but they can also be recombined into large scale experiences.
So you can have a mass, a group, or an individual experience, and you could be accessing from
different locations.
So you could get all the sports fans together for a particular game quite easily.
And then, just like we're doing on Zoom, actually, you could have breakout groups,
all these sorts of things. Manovitch calls these kinds of adjustments Digital Compositing.
So when Michał and I picked our 10 cities, we wanted to pick Toronto and Hamilton and
Waterloo.
We wanted to pick Ontario and CBC.
So we looked at the CBC news story, and I particularly interviewed
several senior managers from CBC to ask them about their strategy and also
the barriers to evolution.
I talked to one senior manager who described what he felt was happening, that they were
moving,
there was this new mobile first strategy that came out.
And at first there was a big, there was resistance to this because the newsroom had
just been reconfigured from being television and radio to being a multimedia newsroom.
So the journalists had got used to being multimedia, and in the BBC's experience, you can know
about television, but perhaps not
radio, it's almost impossible to be a mixed media journalist because you learn your craft,
but
all the journalists were asked to conceive the
broadcast,
or the distribution of all the material as a river of different kinds of media to
delivered to the mobile phone.
And this came off the back of what Mulser has been talking about,
actually in 2012, the Kitchener Waterloo area of Toronto was providing CBC, was providing
radio with digital components.
So it was radio first with paratext, if you like, with appendages that were digital
webpages, maybe some tweeting, some early social
media, or not so early actually, but you know,
some rather primitive social media.
And then along come the local web pages strengthening the local content in 2014,
and then this huge explosion of radical reinvention of the news from digital
only, mobile first, river of content, 2016.
So they changed their operating methods, their philosophy; there was very, very slow
cultural reorientation, and it was seen as a threat.
It was also seen as another channel.
So the mindset was still channel-oriented rather than seeing things as delivered to
in
different ways at different times. Young people, Viktor Grassmuck, who I did some
work with recently, was at a conference with recently,
and he's been doing some
work on what is public service media?]
3.0 as well.
And we asked him to look at young people, how young people see media as a
cloud of different experiences.
And they see it as a media verse, a sort of, different experiences clustered
around a brand or story through which you can get your message across as a public service
media outlets.
So particularly young people, age 14 to 16, are using media in different ways.
So a group of us are looking, including Charles Davis from Ryerson University,
Christine Horz from the Applied University of Cologne, and myself,
we're looking at some young people's media use because the BBC asked us to specifically
look at 14 to 16 year olds,
because they're finding it very difficult to cater for this new, with this age group
who use media in different ways.
But, however, if you get it right, one senior manager at CBC said to me, they were seeing
a threefold or triple digit increase in the volume of daily visits to mobile.
So when they were getting it right, it was really increasing the traffic.
So Michał and I have, if you're interested in seeing our findings, that's
where you can find them.
We see the need, desperate need, really, urgent need for internal reorganization,
and CBC is one of the public service media
who've been very courageous about this.
They may be failing in other areas, but they've been really courageous and really
going for it.
We were really impressed.
And this river of media, this reinvention of content, to think of it, not in channels,
but as a flow going in different directions.
I think, you know, Michał and I thought was moving towards the fourth industrial revolution
and going in the right direction.
But what it requires externally is media clustering, is basically, instead of public service media
being in large statement buildings, they need to be where the technologists are.
They need to be whether creatives and the gamers are the people creating games and social
media.
They need to cluster with new high technology and new kinds of creative firms to accelerate
this internal internal change.
And they need to have new partner relationships.
You can't just commission anymore.
You have to be working with people creatively, internally, mixed media, working, not multimedia
journalists, but people doing their own specialism next to somebody else who is a specialist
in another type of storytelling, new partnership frameworks, not just commissioning
and that needs many people, not just a commissioning editor, but many people who their job is to
help public service media folk, producers work with other producers, and complete
datafication through the whole system.
So I just wanted to, you know, we've all already mentioned this book, but if you're
interested in it, what I've just presented is in there alongside other
folk's contributions. You know, Philip Savage was
one of the three people leading on the book, so I recommend it.
Thanks, Lizzie.
A really amazing, broad view of things.
I've heard a number of, some of what you've said about this before, but a really interesting
overview of what's going on.
Is there anyone with an immediate comment or a quick question for Lizzie at
this point?
Yeah, I was going to say speaking to the idea that new media was initially a
threat to journalism.
That was the case with the CBC, according to Wade Roland in 1997 CBC had less
than a dozen people working with online activities, working to develop
online avenues of distribution.
I remember, they were like all in one room, too.
Yeah, and then the other thing I was going to
say, it's really interesting, this idea of
data going back and forth,
because I think with a lot of the public broadcasters, or at least with CBC,
they're interested in operating on multi-platforms partly because they can collect that data.
So at the same time, while there's various kinds of contents being
packaged and repackaged and tailored to different user experiences, the people who develop the
apps for CBC are also developing user profiles.
And those are different than actual people.
Like, they're developing, they're accumulating large amounts
of data to try to imagine and project how users might be navigating through these
online applications.
So it's not just that they're trying to package and repackage content for different
users, but they're actually imagining users differently,
imagining them in a lot of ways,
I think as packets of data. That's an aside.
Yeah, and what you say is an interesting sort of
correspondence with what Lizzie has been saying
at the limits to that, the effects of that. She talks about it in terms of some of the
effective aspects of that, that can be useful as well.
Okay.
So next up, taking a slight turn in terms of someone who represents some of
those audiences who get programmed, and it's a great pleasure to have Daniel Bernhard
with us from--are you identifying yourself as from the Centre for International
Governance Innovation, but also FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting?
Yeah, if CG's listening,
I'd love a fellowship, but I don't have one yet.
So just FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting for now.
Oh! Great.
Well, thank you very much, Philip, and to the rest of the panelists.
Unlike my esteemed colleagues here, I dropped out of grad school.
And so I'm afraid that my English may be much more plain and my analysis perhaps much
more simple, but hopefully provides an applied perspective which can complement
the great and illustrious expertise on offer from the other panelists
today.
Just by way of context, the FRIENDS of Canadian broadcasting is an independent, not-for-profit
organization.
We've been around since 1985.
FRIENDS is not associated, affiliated with the CBC in any way.
We don't take any money from them or any other media company print broadcast, or any
corporation at all.
For that matter, we are 100% citizen funded.
And though we do support and advocate on behalf of a truly public CBC,
which is public, both in ownership, financial reality, but also in nature and character,
we sometimes have an antagonistic relationship with the CBC as well in cases where they
deviate from their public purpose and the spirit and
sometimes even the letter of the Broadcasting Act.
And so our interest here really is about preserving this non-commercial public space in the digital
era.
The CBC is the single
public space that all Canadians can inhabit together and with a country that must
retain some sense of unity across such great physical distance,
this is, of course, a very important function
in the maintenance of our sovereignty and independence.
And so that really is our concern, is how to maintain this shared space.
And as we know the CBC is basically the only media organization in the country, there
are,
of course, a couple of other not-for-profit organizations, but most of them, most
media in the country will speak to you or see the audience as a consumer to be
manipulated or sold.
And there are relatively few places that treat the audience as a citizen to be served,
honoured, respected, and informed.
And so this is why we place such a high importance on it.
So when we talk about CBC in the digital platforms, I think of this in two ways: on the one hand,
we're thinking about the CBC itself and its use of digital tools,
and on the other hand, its relationship to existing platforms, companies like
Facebook, with which it has commercial agreements, and even something like Netflix,
which may not fall into the category of digital platforms in the way that you're thinking
about it,
but also has commercial implications for the CBC.
And as far as I can see, or at least see right now, I would put my thoughts
into three buckets, three questions, three problem areas that arise for the
CBC and that the CBC really needs to address, but that all of us as well, as a
voting public, as an audience also have an interest and a role in addressing.
So I think the first is legitimacy.
There are parties that will allege that,
for example, the CBC has no legal mandate to be engaged in digital activities.
Many of these are self interested competitors.
I'm thinking of Québecor, for example, which has recently made representations to
the broadcast regulator in Canada
to this effect, but even though it's a claim without merit, it is still
a claim that appears often.
And so, there is a question about legitimacy that I think the CBC needs
to make sure it can always address with credibility.
And unfortunately, the CBC's actions in response to these types of accusations have,
leave a lot to be desired
in some cases, I'm thinking, for example, of
initiatives like Tandem, the
large sponsored content initiative, which gained a lot of controversy in Canada. Over
16,000 supporters of the FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting signed a petition calling for
Tandem to be stopped, arguing that CBC's digital properties should not be one massive advertorial.
But the CBC's legitimacy is really predicated upon its distinctiveness, its distinctiveness
in its public service orientation, and having a hyper commercialization mandate
and management team really does undermine that legitimacy.
And unfortunately, it gives critics like Mr. Pelito, self-interested though they may be,
an advantage that perhaps they don't warrant on the merits of their argument alone.
I think the same can be true of the requirement to have people have an account to sign up
for
Gem. Obviously, personalization, data mining, et cetera can be considered valuable
activities.
They're competing, the CBC, with many services that are offering personalized selection as
a core part of their value proposition.
But this does also compromise universality.
And again, the reason why these companies collect these data is for purposes of
commercial advancement and personal manipulation.
And so, can the CBC make the argument that these same techniques can be used towards
more beneficial
ends? And finally, in terms of legitimacy, I think we have to look really closely at
collaborations with some of the large American companies. Catherine Tait,
the president of the CBC, famously with both feet in her mouth, compared Netflix
to the British Raj
and abruptly ended all co-productions with Netflix, causing
shows like Anne with an E, for example, to be discontinued, much to the chagrin of over
one and a half million people around the world, who've called for it to be reinstated through
a petition.
But we also know that CBC has commercial agreements with Facebook.
Facebook's representatives have testified to that effect.
We don't know exactly the nature of those agreements, but we do know that Facebook is
basically the antithesis of what the CBC ought to be.
Its commitment to public service is negligible, its commitment to transparency,
political dialogue, is zero.
And its collection of data, et cetera, around content for the CBC is problematic.
And so these commercial agreements with the devil, as deals with the devil tend to be,
raise some questions about legitimacy that I think need to be addressed.
The second bucket is money: will the CBC enough money to compete,
and what are the financial implications of this digital era in which we find
ourselves as of 2018, which is the most recent data that we have.
The CBC was 18th out of 20 comparable OECD countries in terms of funding for public broadcasting
at an average of $33 per person per year, compared to the industrial average of
about a hundred dollars and the tops being the Nordics, that 170, 180 kind of territory.
Most of these countries, of course, like the BBC, for example, at about $100 per person
per year, are serving more or less one time zone in one language with some exceptions
in smaller services.
Whereas with--and they have twice as many people,
so three times per capita, twice as many people, so six times as much money.
So with one sixth of that money, the CBC has to have services covering six times zones
to radio and to TV in English and French each, plus digital services in English and
French each, and a Northern service in English, French, and eight Indigenous languages.
That is not free.
And the fact that the CBC is able to maintain this level of service is great.
When we look at the general trends, especially when it comes to fictional programming,
you can't stretch this dollar forever.
The CBC testified at its licensed renewal hearings that it spends two-ish million dollars,
per hour of original production
on a good day.
We know that Netflix, on some of its biggest shows, is spending 13, 14, 15. CEO Reed
Hastings has said $20 million an hour is not out of the question.
How can you compete when global exploitation allows some of your competitors to achieve
a scale that is so much greater?
I mean, the CBC used to be competing against American studios for American audiences.
Now it's a global game, 2 million versus 20 million.
It's hard to to find that many, you know, value store hits that can really
break through, although they have managed to do it to some extent. There's also the
issue of technical labor costs as software developers are, you know, in great shortage.
They cost a lot of money more than camera operators, et cetera.
So developing this technical infrastructure is no small feat and adds additional
financial pressures.
The response through pay walling,
for example, again comes to the legitimacy question about universality and
also just drives audiences,
in some cases, away. We have this, you know, terrible situation in which the worst awful
most, you know, false content is free on Facebook and the best, most accurate, interesting
content is, you know, available to paying subscribers for, you know, the New York times,
the Financial Times, the Globe and Mail, Netflix, et cetera.
And the CBC could potentially be a bridge for people without the financial
means to have maintained four or five, six paid subscriptions to still have content of
comparable quality.
How's that gonna work when we're pay walling and when we're advertising
so aggressively, like the pre-roll ads on CBC are absolutely insufferable; they're way
more aggressive than what the private broadcasters are doing.
The banner ads are amazing.
It's really a threat to the character and legitimacy,
but also the accessibility of the CBC.
The other financial pressure, of course, is service production.
In Toronto alone, I believe we make over $2 billion a year worth of film and television
product.
Most of that is American content for big American studios driving up the price of creating domestic
Canadian content.
While it's good for the industry, it may not be good for the country, for us
to become a factory for somebody else's culture,
which seems to be the route that we've taken, driving up costs for everybody.
The CBC in particular, there are some answers to this on the horizon, including policies
to require companies like Google and Facebook to pay Canadian journalists, journalism organizations
for their news as has been done in Australia. The Australian public broadcaster
was captured in the mandatory news bargaining code.
That's positive.
There are also other creative ideas, for example, requiring that over the top streaming
services like Netflix, which,
hopefully soon to be regulated in Canada, can perhaps make, you know, be entered
into co-production agreements with the CBC again as as a way of meeting
their license obligations to the CRTC. You know, maybe instead of saying
you have to contribute 20% of your revenues to financing Canadian content, we can say
maybe it's 15, but the CBC gets first run.
There are ways that we could potentially do these types of things to provide external
financing to the public broadcaster from these other sources and perhaps the commercialization
would be the quid pro quo that, you know, getting out of advertising would
allow this to happen.
And the final set of challenges I say are in the environment.
Writ large, you know, the rest of the news industry and the broadcasting
industry in Canada is in a death spiral, right,
the private television workforce in Canada over the last 10 years has been cut in half
since 2016.
We've lost nearly 20,000 journalism jobs in Canada, print broadcast, et cetera.
In 2019, before the pandemic, almost half of commercial radio stations in Canada operated
at a loss.
And that was before the pandemic drove the price of advertising even further into the
ground.
And so we face this situation in which the CBC is not only cash strapped and kind of
imperiled, but it will be cash strapped, imperiled, and the last man standing in many places,
putting even further strains and adding even more expectations with no increase for
funding.
We also have other policy questions, like for example, will targeted behavioural advertising
continue to be legal?
My position is that it should be completely strictly banned.
Like other socially destructive business models, child slavery was also very profitable,
but alas bad for the world. You know, will this continue?
And how will that affect the competitive environment?
Will the private media that survive have paywalls that are so strict and so strong
that, you know, more audiences come to the CBC? Will Facebook continue
to accelerate?
The de-legitimized nation of media and public service in general, by amplifying the activity
of, you know, incendiary far-right figures who we know get far better treatment,
and far greater amplification from platforms like Facebook.
So these are things that are outside of the CBC's control, but that scholars like
yourselves, citizens like the FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting can champion and
pay attention to.
So I would say in terms of the way forward and in closing I would, I would just
add a few points.
First,
we need supportive public policy and adequate funding for the public broadcaster. Period.
And this is especially true, given the wider collapse in the media.
We can get creative.
This doesn't all have to come from general treasury.
Like I said, this can come from a monopoly tax
like the one that was created in Australia, it can come through kind of compulsory co-production
agreements.
It can come through a tax on behavioural advertising, you know, in the same way
that cigarette taxes finance public health efforts.
We can say that the damage from targeted behavioral advertising can finance public information
efforts.
So we definitely have some opportunities there, but we need to set our minds to it in
earnest.
And right now, that is not happening.
Even the new Broadcasting Act says nothing about the CDC, which is Canada's central broadcaster.
Second, the legitimacy questions need to be addressed, and they need to be addressed solidly
and in perpetuity. This means that CBC, especially English services, need to get out of advertising.
The financial records show that advertising for the CBC is a decreasingly necessary evil.
In other words, the time in which the cost of selling the ads will outpace the revenue
gained from the ads is probably only two or three years into the future.
And so, despite several decades of commercialization schemes that were meant to win over audiences
and, you know, transform the commercial fortunes of the CBC, none of those have worked.
Trying again will also not work;
all it does is piss people off.
And so, the end of ads is an inevitability, and we need to find a way to
do it responsible. No tracking as well.
And, you know, the CBC should be an exploitation free zone.
They shouldn't be playing with these tools that Facebook and Google
are playing with.
Instead, we should be working to demonstrate that there are responsible alternatives and
that those other tools are nefarious and potentially illegitimate,
and in my opinion, should be banned.
And finally, the CBC needs greater independence.
The board of directors of the CBC cannot hire or fire the president of the CBC. The
board and the president are political appointees that owe their jobs to the Prime Minister.
This
is just a bad system that most other respectable countries have avoided.
And we're Canada, a serious country.
We would avoid it too.
And finally, we need to remember that the CBC is a central institution supporting Canadian
stories, and this word, story, seems fluffy, but it includes journalism and includes culture.
If we get the majority of our culture from a country in which a significant number of
people think it's acceptable to bring a gun to a kindergarten, we are going to have a
problem. And journalism,
fictional storytelling that talks about our history and our reality and our future allows
us to pick our own path forward, which may be different to the path of the United States.
That's what independence looks like.
The CBC was founded in 1932 by a conservative Prime Minister who recognized the importance
of this new, powerful tool called radio to instil a national consciousness and
enshrine and engage with people to build a national identity.
And that purpose is true today.
And so anything that we do with respect to the CBC needs to keep this importance in mind,
and all of this just adds to the urgency, in my opinion, of what I've laid out.
So thank you for your patience and for inviting me today. I'm happy to discuss if there is
anything to discuss, and if not, I'll just shut up.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much,
and thanks for mentioning R. B. Bennett,
we don't hear enough about that great Nova Scotian.
So in the interest of time and to make sure that Chris gets a chance to tell his
story, go ahead, Chris.
Sorry, Christopher.
Brilliant. Okay,
Thank you everybody.
Due to the brevity of this talk,
I've had to cut out a lot of stuff about, obviously,
public service media and platformization
as well as the important context regarding CBC Radio and the history of CBC's
engagement podcasts.
So if you're interested in that, hit me up up later during the chat or the Q and A, or
afterwards as well by email.
So in today's brief talk, I'll briefly address the CBC's engagement with podcasting, and
then
discuss what the increasing platformization of podcasting suggests about the CBC's position
in the Canadian mediascape.
I'm going to argue that the case of podcasting and the CBC exemplifies
the institution's gradual displacement in a mediascape increasingly dominated by digital
platforms and suggest that this dynamic has been exacerbated by both the CBC's policies
and a lack of clear, political direction from federal regulators.
And I'm going to conclude by suggesting some potential policy or directions the organization
might embrace as part of a broader attempt to, first, redefine its role in Canadian society,
and second, ensure its long-term viability in a
digital mediascape characterized by
extreme competitiveness and intensive commercialization.
So Canadians love podcasting.
According to Edison Research, you can see here, 37% of the Canadians populations
listened to podcasts every month in 2020. Despite a slow start with podcasting, the
CBC has experienced success in the project testing arena with 11.2 million active downloads
per month, as of late 2019.
And we look at it offerings: the CBC has done really well with its podcasting operation
in
terms of showcasing diversity in emerging voices and pushing them outwards into
international spaces. Here's another example of
some of those.
It's also done a really good job
monetizing its audio offerings, and that's, of course, a controversial issue, as we've
already kind of discussed and may discuss more later. In 2019 they partnered with Triton
Digital to engage in dynamic ad insertion, to maximize the revenue generated by its podcast
offerings.
So podcasting has been a key vehicle for taking the audio offerings of CBC producers
and commercializing them, something that wasn't possible, of course, with terrestrial radio,
due to a regulatory prohibition.
Having said that, though, here as elsewhere, the CBC is primarily focused on content, taking
on an uncritical and unreflective approach to making that content available wherever
Canadians and others wish to access it, as Miles and Daniel have already kind
of touched on, really the
policy approaches being, let's just make it available everywhere, no matter what the values
of those given platforms or institutions might be.
So, you know, the CBC is of course on Spotify and it has been for a couple of years.
You can see, you can pretty much listen to any CBC podcast you want on Spotify.
It's also on YouTube.
Here's an example.
Someone Knows Something, they've uploaded all
their episodes.
So, you know, you can access all of the CBC's audio offerings without ever actually
having to enter CBC space.
Something that really mirrors the, again, the broader approach that CBC has taken to
third-party platforms, and something that I think, and we've heard from others as well
here today, threatens to gradually undermine the CBC's legitimacy
and displace it as a preeminent media institution in Canada.
When I'm talking about platformization today and the platformization of podcasting, the
key thing here is that I think this is going to soon become more of a practical issue for
the CBC because we're reaching a point where podcasting is no longer solely and perhaps
even primarily about content because it is being platformized through the
emergence of institutions like Spotify and it' entry into the podcasting sector,
YouTube as a primary site for the engagement with podcasts, Amazon music, and now Sirius
is getting into that space as well.
So these are going to soon become both primary access points for podcasts and also prime
movers in terms of shaping the industry and also consumer demand, or user demand, we might
say, for certain types of podcasts.
So we're looking at this here, again, research from Signal Hill Insights
here.
How do people access podcasts in Canada as of May 2020? Well, YouTube is a big one,
Apple podcasts, of course, Spotify, the app of the people who produce
the podcast, which might be CBC Listen here, in this case,
and then some other ones. You can see it really is increasingly about these,
about these platforms.
And if we look at it,
we've got a platform like Spotify, for example, moving into the podcast space with its established
user bases, bodies of information about its users, the ability to monetize those users,
and also actively nudge those users into consuming certain types of content, shake their behaviour,
and they have a lot of resources.
So they've been acquiring content, you know, they started with the platform and now
they're heading into the content, right?
And so, Spotify bought Gimlet, it purchased the rights to Joe Rogan. Sirius just the other
day acquired 99% Invisible, Roman Mars, you know, pretty canonical public
service, public radio podcast about design.
Amazon has purchased Wondering, we also see.
Not a lot of the key creators and producers as individual podcast creators, I should say,
are leaving legacy institutions like the CBC, NPR, and the BBC to go to these companies
and
their subsidiaries which can offer a lot of money and also creative freedom.
So it's platforms here looking to consolidate their positions within the
podcasting space. Spotify has acquired the podcast creation software
app Anchor in 2019,
something that makes it really easy for those who are aspiring to create podcasts,
to go to Spotify as a kind of one-stop shop for creation, exhibition, and monetization.
And recently, both Spotify and Apple podcasts announced plans to roll out podcast monetization
services to allow creators to directly charge subscribers, or in the parlance of Spotify,
followers.
And NPR actually is set to collaborate with both these initiatives.
And finally, Spotify has just announced preliminary plans as well
for a new initiative that will enable users to plug Spotify content directly into Facebook.
And this is a product, I think, that has the potential to finally crack the code on
the creation of, quote unquote, social audio experiences, which have been difficult to
engineer in a meaningful way.
Now someone said, of course, that the CDC has its own platform for podcasts
and audio content, CBC Listen, and this is true.
It's successful as a consolidated space for all the CBC's audio offerings from library
radio to music to podcasts.
The problem, though, is that preliminary research suggests that Listen is most popular with
older CBC listeners.
In other words, the kinds of people who used to
tap into CBC radio all day long and listen
for all their audio media needs.
Younger listeners are moving to, or kind of always already been at those other platforms
and are not necessarily going to be swayed and drawn into CBC
Listen, because, you know, CBC Listen is only CBC content, it doesn't offer
other things.
So this is a significant issue, right?
The core problem here is that the CBC has been reduced to the status of "complementor,"
and in fact has embraced this status.
This is a new term that David Nieborg and Thomas Poell bring in from
business and management literature to address the role of institutional users on major platforms
like your Facebook, your Spotify, YouTube, you name it.
The CBC in effect is a kind of a super user that
is there engaging with, as we've already
heard from Miles and Daniel, its own kind of revenue sharing
and data sharing agreements with the platform, but effectively is operating on
a secondary level.
It doesn't really control the interface here.
So there are a number of issues, right?
Obviously, lack of control over the policies that govern presentation and functioning
of CBC materials in these spaces,
potential value conflicts, as we've already heard,
as these platforms are predicated upon practices associated with surveillance capitalism,
don't really have time to fully expand on that now, but I think people are probably,
heard a fair bit about that already.
And these things may be seen, as Daniel just mentioned quite concisely and eloquently,
to conflict and run counter to the CBC's public service mandate.
And at the moment, the CBC is effectively, complicit with its status, given its status
as a complementor.
In other words, the platform-neutral approach, as the podcast situation illustrates, is fine
as a means of connecting with your users and citizens.
But what happens when the platforms are not neutral and their values may be, seem to conflict
with the values that you yourself, as an institution ostensibly represent? Another
issue is brand.
Or as I prefer to say in this context, identity annihilation. Users are engaging with CBC
content
through intermediating platforms, and thus forming connections with programs
and their hosts and potentially the platforms, but not necessarily with the producing organization.
And then the increased difficulty in holding onto talent as massive companies snap
up the best creators.
I talked about this a little bit before, but we've seen this with Jonathan Goldstein, creator
of
Wiretap, moving to Gimlet to do heavyweight. Connie Walker,
you know, famous journalist doing a lot of excellent work on Indigenous issues in
Canada, of course just recently went to Gimlet and has begun now to produce programs
for them.
And then, finally, a potential loss of legitimacy.
And Daniel just covered this quite nicely, but this dynamic, I think, really reflects
how hostile commentators and regulators may eventually renew calls to defend the
CBC and either just, you know, be done with public funding for media altogether
or give its money directly to creators.
And as Daniel was saying, it's easy to poke holes in this discourse.
I think there are good counter arguments to be made, but nevertheless, it is a discourse
that is increasingly prominent
and I think increasingly carrying weight, in the public consciousness, in the
civic sphere, if you like.
So I think this is coming to a critical point right now because the CBC is so dependent
upon these external platforms.
You really risk,
I think, de-legitimizing the institution in the eyes and ears,
if you will, of younger viewers, listeners, who are going to form the next audience
for the institution, as well as the taxpayers and regulators who must continue to support
it.
And I think this is exposing the flaws and the CBC's sort of uncritical and unreflective
embrace of all manner of platforms, from Facebook, to YouTube, to Spotify, that are fundamentally
beyond its control.
So I've got a few ideas for things that the CBC might do in the spirit of the conference
to improve things.
And I'll wrap up with these.
So above all,
CBC needs to figure out, of course, who it is
and what it should be, as we probed right now.
There are a lot of tensions between some of the normative arguments we have for public
service media that are still strongly associated with the CBC and how the CBC actually operates.
And I think that it really needs to determine, you know, what it wants to be as a means of
preparing it to take an active role in the shaping of the next Broadcasting Act and establishing
for itself a more advantageous regulatory dynamic with its overseeing agencies.
The CBC will not be able to compete with major platforms and companies for top talent.
It should focus on Canadian talent and specifically on emerging voices, finding and developing
new Canadian talent, and then pushing it outwards to other parts of the country and
foreign markets as well.
It shouldn't seek to compete with the most expensive things.
The CBC loves, as we've seen here, to seek advertising digital spaces. Certainly,
that's the case with podcasting.
They seem to be positively giddy at the prospect of monetizing audio offerings for
the first time.
However, as the Yale report observes,
CBC Radio Canada's ability to transform itself successfully
into a public media institution
with the distinct features we have highlighted is somewhat compromised by its continuing
reliance on advertising, which necessarily introduces a commercial imperative insurance
to
decision-making.
So in the case of podcasting, we know that users enjoy, or at least often don't terribly
mind, advertisements.
The research is quite clear on this.
People actually tend to like, especially host-read ads.
They're not as intrusive as conventional advertisements. At the same time,
there's the aforementioned risk that the commercial imperative here, and perhaps more importantly.
the potential loss of a basis for the CBC to distinguish itself in a
crowded marketplace, might eventually undermine, its ability to function in that environment.
There's also the issue of the double commercial imperatives here, where
the CBC, in its capacity as complementor, is subject to the commercial imperatives
that a platform like Spotify or YouTube might have, which may or may not be in alignment
with what the CBC wants to do, but certainly are beyond the CBC's influence to
a significant degree.
Finally, on the specific question of platforms, I wanted to introduce this quotation from
Catherine Tait, and I think it resonates quite nicely with what Daniel was saying earlier,
Miles as well,
you know, talking about the nature of public spaces; safe, trusted public spaces,
and the notion that this is what public media can provide.
The CBC, I don't think has actually been doing a very good job of doing this, especially
with respect to its kind of platform neutral approach to getting its content out there
and engaging.
And I think the case of podcasting illustrates that the organization must determine how it
wants to proactively shape its relationship with commercial platforms with which
it is increasingly integrated.
This is clearly an issue on the news information side, as David Taras and Christopher Waddell
observe in "The End of the CBC?", but also here for podcasting.
This is an existential question.
And the CBC needs to think about its own values and how they relate to these platforms.
Probably it needs to create a, do a more meaningful effort at creating its own platform that might
act as a kind of a public service competitor.
And I've elsewhere talked a lot about what public service platforms might look like.
That's conversations beginning to happen all over the world now, thankfully, but with
respect to podcasting, one idea would be to expand on Podcast Playlist, which is a
CBC show that highlights all kinds of podcasts from all over the world, not just CBC stopped.
So take this logic, bring it to CBC, listen and bring the curatorial work that the CBC
is doing where it's able to leverage its identity as a trusted force in the
mediascape both in Canada and abroad and use that to really make itself a resource
for public service podcasts, potentially highlighting podcasts that you wouldn't otherwise find
elsewhere.
And really, kind of, drawing people in with something that is different and distinctive
and making a real contribution to Canadian civic life and also to a broader multinational
media verse beyond what it's doing now, which is unfortunately kind of reducing it
to being something that is very similar to what other things that are already out there,
including, hate to say it, but a lot of commercial things that are already out there
as well.
So I see these as exciting ideas.
And to my mind, they offer the best possible chance of ushering in a fruitful new era for
the CBC's audio programming division, and really
the CBC more broadly.
But this can only happen if the CBC can both obtain clarity from regulators regarding
this mandate and funding going forward, and also perhaps, you know, most critically,
get engaged in a process of earnest self-reflection that might result in a revitalized and unified
institutional mission for the platform paradigm.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Christopher.
We have just under 10 minutes left, and I wanted to offer, at this point, a chance
for
anyone who is not a presenter who is dying to ask a question of any of the presenters.
So if anyone wants to unmute and pose a quick question or comment, now is your
time.
I'll put a general one out there, which is just to ask any of the presenters today,
and they were all very interesting,
assuming the same pot of money is available for the CBC in the next, say, two or three
fiscal years, the cost of developing and maintaining a platform where the cost of content moderation
is very high.
What would you shift?
Where would you shift resources to allow for the creation of a platform that would be in
competition with some very established ones, and content moderation has been an ongoing
issue for a number of legacy organizations, as well as the CBC, in terms of the commentary
devolves much more quickly than you might like sometimes.
So I'm curious where you would shift the resources
to make these things happen.
You know, you sound a little bit like a CRTC commissioner from some of those,
the money question, the resource question is a good one. Where would you shift it?
It's a bit of an existential question, isn't it.
I mean, you've only got so much money.
And if you're putting more of it to the back end, to building the platforms, to the distribution
and the, you know, competing, you don't have as much money to develop talent or put
talent out there.
It's just, there's only so much.
And how do you create that?
I mean, it's an ongoing situation that the operation is dealing with right now.
So among the panelists, anyone?
Yeah, this is the key question that the BBC faced.
I was their online community manager for about seven years.
And that was the, it was the big, the money was going up the whole time.
So everybody, the BBC was very keen to have messaged calls, live chats, chat runs.
We rolled them out for different programs and everything, but the moderation bell
was absolutely huge.
And it kept going up as we opened different types of social media.
We trained up the librarians and the BBC libraries to do the moderation.
That was 15 people
when we first started, then we had to outsource it to a company and all these companies start
suddenly started to form that were specializing in moderation.
Then we started to segment it into filters of filtering out swear words and things like
that.
And then we explored partnerships with the audience to trustees, to, as AOL
did, to try and get a partnership with the audience.
And the bill became so great,
that the BBC's answer was to cut their internal social media and to move everything externally
onto different providers.
But the thing is, what the BBC gave away was the use of user data, the user accounts.
And we developed quite a lot of editorial policy on moderation and publics moderation
for public service environments.
Going forward, that's why I sort of argue that we should revisit things like
a public service algorithm.
You know, why not have something which is smart, intelligent.
If you like this, you like this.
Hence, that's why I'm interested in IMF,
the IMF format, which a lot of broadcasts are starting to adopt now, or have
been for the last five years.
I think we have to have a mixture of automation.
Intelligent data, sourcing, and selection,
and also a job which I, in my PhD, I argued that the job of a presenter is a mediator.
You know, it was mentioned that this, you know, why not, there are some people
who are good mediators, and, but you could have somebody who's presenting out front and
somebody who's curating at their side in a different way.
So a mixture of intelligence infrastructure, and you still have to have the human element,
but that could be supplied by other people, other audience members, or in many different
ways.
I think it's a really key nut to crack.
And what I'm seeing is these, that's why I'm getting into these young people, because
they're looking at, they created bricolage.
They're interested in bricolage instead of channels.
They're interested in aggregating stuff around a particular thing or a moment or an environment,
or a brand.
I'm going to have to stop you at this before we go too deep into the bricolage,
but is there anyone else who has a burning question
they want to ask any of the panelists?
This point, if not, I think that there's, some of the panelists were looking, other,
when
you were looking to, sorry, other than Lizzy, who might have something to say
about that notion that Marlene raised. Chris?
Or Daniel, go ahead.
Yeah, thank you.
I think that the question of allocation of resources is a good one.
And this is an area personally with which I'm greatly frustrated with the CBC.
If, you know, there's the old joke that every Canadian has two jobs, their job and
running the CBC.
So, you know, I don't want it to fall victim to that, but if I were in charge of the
CBC, one of the things that I would do is say, here's what we can do with the money
we have.
If we have less money, here's what has to go.
And if we had more money, here's what we'd be able to do.
Now, the position of the CBC is that this constitutes lobbying and using its public
platform to influence politics.
I disagree, but that's their view.
So I don't think they can do everything.
I don't think there is some magical reorientation that they can do to just achieve all these
things.
And so, we have to make choices, and those choices should be made explicit and
public.
And I think that's one of the areas where the CBC could do better.
And also, I think, you know, Canadians support the CBC, and they support funding
for the CBC.
They should make it clear what they're getting, what they would lose and what they stand to
gain.
Okay, thanks.
Any other final thoughts or comments, but the panelists?
Yeah, I mean, to follow up on what Daniel's saying, I think distinctiveness
is the key thing in terms of the spaces in which the CBC is going to operate.
So now they were quite eager as we all were, to embrace social media because it was new
and exciting, but we know what it is now, and
we know how it operates, and the CBC does as well.
So it's time to revisit platform neutrality and really think about what they can do economically
with their own space.
So obviously, they're not going to get off social media, but what about using social
media to promote CBC content and draw people back into CBC spaces that would then offer
a distinctive alternative instead of simply trying to use these platforms and also
offer something that is very similar to them as well.
I think there's a lot that they can do in terms of reorienting how they're approaching
what they're already doing based around content, but also thinking a little bit about
existing infrastructure in order to make themselves more distinctive and offer more
that is going to be of value while also being there.
That requires a vision and it requires people to grapple with what you call the existential
questions.
And to this extent we haven't seen that.
We've seen marketing, we've seen branding, we've seen little initiatives here
talk about technology, but what is this for? Something equivalent to a charter review,
the BBC would have? We're lacking that, we're lacking it
in statute, we're lacking it in process, and we're lacking a voluntary offering for
management as well.
And that makes it difficult for us to get on board as to exactly what this could be.
Well, look, thank you very much, everybody, we've run out of time.
This has been a great
conversation, series of conversations.
Thanks so much to all the panelists and thanks to all the
rest of you, who sat and listened to this.
And I hope that we'll be able to share some of this at some point further and maybe
have the conversation extend again.
It's been a real pleasure having you all here.
And we look forward to, again, more interesting discussion in some other
future venue.
Thanks.
Thanks all you.
of the, sort of the broad ideas behind some of the public service media, especially with
regard to CBC and the idea of platforms.
So I want to talk about, in a sense, this kind of, what I would say is w what
I'll call it digitization and universalism in public service media.
And I've been working on some of the ideas around this for a few years.
Um, and it really came to a head a couple of years ago from her conference,
the ripe conference, um which is a conference, uh, that looks at the sort of state of
public service media around the world.
Uh, and in 2018 a number of people actually gathered.
Uh, together to, um gather in, in, um, Madrid, Spain and we're hosted by
the Spanish public service media RTV E uh, and also by the university of Novara.
And the idea was that there was a kind of a start of a discussion about the nature of
public service media and in particular the ways in which there were new dynamics
and perspectives emerging.
And in a sense, there were two questions that I've used to sort of from that event, for
me to sort of follow through and do some research in terms of.
You know, what is happening in terms of platforms, um, and different digital forms.
So the first question was to what degree to different public surface media, digital forms
and platforms and their attempted content development and distribution respect, the
diversity of unique affordances provided through public service media.
And it's.
So doing question two, how do public service media maintain sufficient degrees of cohesion,
trustworthiness, fairness, and inclusion that it remained profess universal Universalist
obligation of public service media.
In a sense, there it's this idea of.
The degree to which different platforms, different forms of digitization, different ways of distributing
and, and experiencing public service.
Um, still reach to a, relative to a broad group of people who are producing
media, but also to the various audiences and communities around public service
media.
And by the way, it's great to see this there.
Um, and Liz of course, was involved in, in, uh, that conference a few years back at the
university of Nevara.
Um, so just as a, kind of a, an overview, it's make some remarks about the idea that
really, since the start of telephony and wireless radio wave communication, And by the way,
I'm at the point of, I'm finally getting around to read mark Rabois book about,
you know, the development of, of of radio, uh, and sort of at the beginning of, of, of
what allowed for public service media and.
Um, but to look at the percent of universals surface has legitimated the ownership and
operation of media as a public trust.
Indeed.
The sense for not for profit and public service communication was taken up by a majority
of the population in, in most countries and often given political heft from a number of
community-based organizations, including farmers, workers, students, immigrants, and different
language communities.
And some of us have done that research around that sort of background.
You know, the fact that in places like Saskatchewan, the, you know, the, the union of, of farmers
were big supporters of public media, public, public radio, um as it was, as it was
first emerging especially in the, in the.
Um, so a lot of communities involved in what is being done in traditionally within public
service media until the 1980s, this principle was a bedrock for the broadcasting mission,
and it's still a mandatory requirement for public media companies today, from CBC in
Canada, the BBC in the UK, ABC Australia, NHK, Japan, et cetera, et cetera.
But in practice we were discussing back then and still discuss it.
The universalism ideal was somewhat, some would say largely abandoned in the 1980s as
media deregulation promised more competition innovation and vigorous economic growth.
And the beginning of multi-platforms quite frankly, um My colleague and coauthor
of the collection of papers that came out of that conference so that Dr.
Greg Lowey pointed out that growing distressing media today is partly rooted in the illusion
that more media and more platforms would inevitably ensure better media in all platforms.
And he went on to argue that there is now more of everything on offer, except social
responsibility.
So in that co-edited a book through the right initiative, universities and public service
media.
We worked through with our colleagues, including some of you, um to interrogate the historical
universalism mission in public service broadcasting and explore its contemporary relevance for
public service media, um including the CDC to two articles that at least two articles
on the CDC.
Um, finally, just to say that another person who's been a big part of that ripe group,
that's done a lot of research in this area is British scholar Peter Goodman.
Who argues that the increasingly pervasive distribution of content over the internet
has largely undone the principle of geographical universality and mixed genre, general channels
are no longer, very popular due to the proliferation of niche options that undermine the universality
of appeal.
A universality universalism has fallen out of favor in Bickert in part, because it is
less achievable.
It seems that the idea of multi channel MOCSSY, uh, distribution points would suggest
that this is something that's universal, but there may be lacking as a result.
Through niche kind of audiences, a place of some level of universal debate and conversation.
And that's probably, it will be also tied to a kind of I would say a political
fragmentation that may also be happening in a number of countries.
So don't want to spend too much time, uh, further talking about that.
But the idea was that we had hoped in writing some of the articles articles and publishing
those that we were able to provide time to discourse on the universalism mission well
into the 21st century and making a case for continuing relevance while acknowledging an
enormous range and degree of complication for actually putting this mission in practice.
So far from being irrelevant.
One could argue that the mission for public service media has both ethical
and instrumental important still today.
So with that as a kind of a general introduction of broad, fairly broad overview let's then
move to talk to some of the ideas that have been shared are being chaired as
well.
So I'm just trying to make sure that I have so miles is here.
And I think whilst you were going to speak to lending online, talk for my tech
platform, ization and the CBC, and I understand you have to, to coauthors for some of
this you're on mute still.
I do have two, two coauthors as well.
I was hoping to share just two slides.
I don't know if I can share them at the same time as, as reading my papers.
Is that possible?
I'll be reading my paper off my, off my computer screen.
I don't want to I'm trying to think if we have to have any support from tomorrow,
do we have any support for, for that to do it, any suggestions for how to do that?
Maybe Amy knows.
Yeah.
Hi.
So I think you can, you can if it's on PowerPoint, you can share the full screen
on PowerPoint and then you can switch to another window or something and read
from her paper then.
Okay.
Let me try.
If, if not, it's fine.
I don't, I don't depend on this, so I'm going to buy it.
Yes, it's going to depend also on how your settings are within power point in terms of
the presentation.
So it may be possible to share the presentation outside of presentation mode, but if it goes
into presentation mode, it may take both displays.
So that might be another variable.
Okay.
That's what I've found.
I think, I think in the interest of time, I'm going to let it be, I don't want to, I
don't want to take care of my system preferences.
That's all right.
I'll I do have two coauthors and I'll I'll start with paper.
So good afternoon.
This brief talk is derived from research, uh, initiated by Dr. David Skinner and executed
in cooperation with Dr.
Amanda OI and myself.
I'll outline our research into CBC and platforms.
We define platforms as digital intermediaries two-sided or multi-sided digital infrastructures,
providing opportunities for different parties to interact.
Including Spotify, Netflix, iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Our research employs a critical political economic approach to communication concerned
with how political and economic forces enable and constrain the allocation production
distribution, and consumption of social resources.
In this case, CVCs communicated resources, attentive to how platforms are ideal for data
extraction in today's economy.
This paper highlights the political and economic context of CBC's platform activities.
Identifying how decisions to allocate resources, to platform based activities, impact CBC's
engagements with users, Vancouver and presents platforms is two-sided or sometimes multi-sided
markets in this sense, traditional print and broadcast media might be seen as two-sided
and that they bring advertisers and readers, uh, audience members.
Contemporary internet based sites that facilitate network relations between users, advertisers,
and content producers like CBC can be seen as multi-sided a key element of platforms
of a platforms.
Value is its capacity for information collection, useful for developing advertising markets
and for directing users, attention to particular content.
The dominance of transnational media platforms has presented a number of challenges to CBC
expanding and media choices, compete for audiences, attention and various platforms gathered user
information to curate content.
This complicates CBC abilities to access and develop audiences.
We sought to better understand the dimensions of these challenges asking what are the dimensions
of CVCs platformization how does CBC you use third-party platforms?
What opportunities do they offer users and what are CBC's policies regarding flat platformization
and how do they relate to its mandate?
So all they've done the first identify some key moments in CVCs extension online
And I'll I'll dental overview, some of CBC's own platforms, as well as its use of third
party platforms.
So CBC has been online since their involvement with teletext and teledonna in the early eighties,
by the nineties, cvc.ca came to be an umbrella for radio, television and news world sites.
The 1995 mandate review committee pointed to the special role public agencies might
take in developing content for the emerging digital world, by the nineties, the Mitchell,
but I missed budget cuts and layoffs CVCs president BD identified new media as a core
function in 97 CVC launched their galaxy digital music channel the following year, CBC news,
online integrated CBC radio, television and news world into a single site in 1999, CBC
committed 2% of budget to online services.
In 2006, CBC informed the heritage committee.
They were a platform neutral content provider and distributor best suited to complementing
the efforts of private broadcast.
As expressed by heritage in 2008, by the government in 2010, CBC CBC should maximize their presence
on all digital platforms.
And by 2012, the LPI LPIs and the migration of advertising dollars online put pressure
on CBC to fill local and public affairs gaps to fill local news and public affairs gaps
and CBC responded by intensifying online services in part with a website in Hamilton, 2012 also
brought CBC music in 2014, amidst grievances from private media companies facing shrinking
revenues and looking towards 2020 CBC explicitly prioritize digital technologies over conventional
radio and TV.
Despite liberal reinvestment in 2016, the corporation maintained prioritization of mobile
and online delivery for local services.
The government's 2017 creative Canada report aligned CBC's multi-platform presence with
their mandate protect, projecting to showcase the best of Canada to the world and to reflect
the country's diversity on multiple platforms.
And to quote the sentiment was echoed in 2019, amidst the legislative review where CBC demanded
assurance and had the flexibility to determine quote the most appropriate platform and delivery
mechanisms to serve Canadians.
And again, during the license renewal hearings, president pate advocated for a platform neutral
approach to counting PNI CVCs has its own platform.
Uh, CBC's online network presence includes the news and public affairs dominated cdc.ca
as well as CBC music and gem their video streaming service launched in 2018.
CDC, cdc.ca is a public affairs focus website.
It's largely, two-sided delivering audiences to banner ads in text and pre-roll advertisements
for videos in 2012.
CBC began licensing content to websites, including Yahoo in the Huffington post to the express
can turn up to the express concern of the established press as private news organizations
directly with paywalls, CBC remain free and complaints became more vocal.
CBC music launched mid to budget cuts in 2000 and budget cuts in 2012, despite
CBC's promotion of CBC music as a public service, their plan called for this platform to be
supported through the sale of advertising.
Uh, the CBC music service also offered.
What would it come out to traditional print media with banner ads, online and video content,
as well as CBC radio streams and curated playlist with pre-roll and spot advertisements.
CBC launched the gem video streaming site in 2018 posting hours of live on-demand content
for free gem is accessible as an app and available@cbc.ca gem and available.
If your Appetit, apple TV and Chromecast granting payment free access to CBC's current TV catalog,
which is mostly ads supported as well as CBCTV feeds.
And the Olympic channel gem also offers over a hundred feature films, Canadian feature
films ad free 4 99 a month removes ads from on-demand content and enables streaming of
CBC news with network to 24 7.
Um, but the live stream still contain ads as they are essentially mirrors of what's
being brought.
Um, and in that case, gen supplements, air to advertisements with streaming national
ads.
So limitations placed on the distribution of programming developed for gem display,
the constraining effects of CBCs, private partnerships, CBCs, CVC, kids, dyno ranch,
a cartoon produced with Disney, for instance, premiered on gem in January.
But the show is conveniently absent from the Disney plus streaming service.
The distributed distributed influence of CBC's relatively secret corporate agreements conflict
with CVCs multi-platform development in the name of public service.
Online media is intensified capacity for data collection exposes the conflict of public
interest and product profit oriented motives animating CBC well CBC aligns data with the
history of pursuing audience feedback to become about better public broadcaster.
CBC also admits that advertisers are willing to pay more to reach targeted audiences.
So just a little bit on CBC's platform.
Networking, CBC has used independent platforms for a variety of reasons, including content
distribution by 2013.
For instance, CVC was the primary Canadian contributor to Netflix.
CBC became a pilot program for podcasting and spring 2005 and began to produce original
podcast in 2015.
Most of their English language radio shows have a podcast on iTunes.
They also use Spotify.
CBC is well-represented at the app store, the four pillars of their presence being CBC
news, CBC gem, CBC listen, and CDC sports.
Each out delivers audiences to advertisers, to various degrees based on the services offered.
And in April, 2021, very recently CBC launched tomorrow moral, I believe it's called
an official language teaching app sponsored directly by Canadian heritage.
CBC is 2010 corporate plan.
First identified enhanced social media as a strategic objective.
Since then, CBC has accumulated 159 English language, Twitter pages on Facebook, the CBCs
news page as its most popular, some shows see Facebook pages offer content to supplement
air to programming CVCs Facebook content is streamed without advertisements.
Uh, CBC also makes modest use of Snapchat discover and Instagram.
So when CBC uses independent platforms to promote and distribute their product, the
network to its chagrin, lacks access to at least some of the data acquired by platforms
about user activity.
President Tate identified data collection as the key arena for cultural sovereignty
in two, in 2019.
It's very unlikely that CBC is data poor.
And it's important to note that we don't know how much and which data CBC is getting on
a given platform.
In any case CVCs express goal to drive interest and user engagement with customized content
reflects the value of platform networking for interfacing users and content producers,
as well as interfacing youth audiences and advertisers.
So by way of some kind of concluding remark, uh, CBC continues to bestride the public and
private elements of the broadcasting system.
Online platform, ization complicates CBC situation, user data valuable as a tool for tailoring
audiences for advertisers is pursued in the name of the public interest.
Furthermore, the multi-sided relations of users, advertisers, and content producers,
including the public broadcaster enabled by platformization remain obscure.
Remain obscured as the allocation of media properties, data and advertising are not subject
to full public disclosure.
CBC, for instance, does not report on social media earnings and annual or quarterly reports,
nor do they disclose their agreements with co-producers, who are operating platforms
of their own.
And one final comment is that CBC's online activities are shaped by policies, including
terms of use privacy, copyright journalistic standards, and practices, as well as policies
about user generated content.
And these policies are available.
They are public but online activities are also shaped by CBC's practice of collecting
cookies, packets of user data, used to track and identify user behavior.
And I think all of these factors are right for discussion as well.
Uh, thank you for.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for that.
Um, that is an extraordinary overview of, uh, some of the developments and, and there's
a sense that the change of paradigm for a public broadcaster in Canada we've
got a couple of minutes.
If anyone else wants to just jump in any of the panelists, want to jump in and, and, and
raise any observations that they have
not hearing anyone jumping in.
Thanks.
Thanks so much miles and we will now go to Lizzie Jackson, who can,
who also is able to tell us a little bit about her research with CBC.
Are you on mute?
Great.
Can you see that?
So I just have to find it
great.
Okay.
So said, this is part of a large study that took about three years S um, unfinished,
um, in, in 20 20, 19, I was funded by the Polish, um science foundation because
they wanted to support that it was the last action they did before they were taken over.
Really by the government.
Um, and they wanted to fund a study to, to ensure the future that looked at what was
necessary to ensure they independent some future of the public Polish public service
media.
Um, so what came out of it?
Uh, I did it with mechanical wacky from the university of Warsaw.
Um, and we looked at 10 cities high technology cities to see where things were going and
major in communications and also critically internal organizational systems, particularly
in the light of the increase of data datafication.
Um, and we wanted to look at whether the public service media, the closest in proximity,
public service media was engaging with the high technology clusters, high technology
cluster.
So like Silicon valley or as I said, an Austin, and of course there's a huge
many clusters in Toronto.
Um, so this is an extra, a presentation from the Canadian that clusters, particularly
in Toronto but also along the corridor from Waterloo to Toronto looking at high
technology clusters and what makes them different, what what's made makes them work,
but also critically, how can that help public service media?
And I argue that to be seen and heard is to be, you have to be data fied now to be seen
on herds.
Um, so I looked at obviously CBC was the closest and Proctor in proximity, public
service media in Toronto.
Um, but also Hamilton, Hamilton and Waterloo.
Um, And datafication I argue enables multi-way recombinase tree delivery
to many audiences, segments of audiences, as you wish over, you know, when you like
it what you want when you want, how you want it to large, medium and small screens.
Um, and what the media is, it's immaterial material, as long as it's tagged and data
Fides and it's data, but to use those sorts of systems, you have to have internal
organizational systems that support such data flows and also relationships with external,
um, technologists and a wider range of creatives.
So what, what, what we could see Michela, and I could see.
Uh, when we look back at the literature and the history, and it's amazing, this is recent
history.
Um, it's interesting how miles was talking about, you know 2012, you know, intensifying
news, local news gaps 2016, prioritizing digital and talking about, you know,
the most appropriate platform platform, neutral approaches, you know, 20 17, 20 18.
There's so recent, really.
Um, but there's been a tremendous ramping up of this disruption, and I just wanted
to bring out some, some some of the sorts of theoretical aspects, if you like, of what,
what we saw was, is happening.
So you get castells and Nova.
Um, you know, talking about the digitalization of objects so that the digitalization, the
move from analog to digital, which was an uncomfortable time and people felt
rather threatened.
Um, and didn't really realize, you know, didn't, didn't there weren't the systems to use the
data.
We were really just talking about better quality, um, you know, high definition not, or, you
know, so linear media, legacy media, as some people call it.
Um, but I think legacy media isn't over yet, but uh, But the digitalization to basically
improve the quality and play out on different devices, then we get some datafication, which
is really once you've digitized your programming or your new site item, or your piece of text
or your objects whatever it might be.
Um, Then that's imported into databases for sorting and retrieval.
Um, and you have to have obviously people who understand databases and people are understand
taxonomies and filing and cloud computing and um, passing par se passing,
uh, data around from and reusing it in different ways.
And Nick counter has written a lot on that.
And now we're moving into the poster, just all which is the blending of the analog and
digital as in the internet of things.
And you can if for example, you could be sitting in a sports stadium watching the
broadcast in the interval, you know and you could also be looking at the the
scores on your mobile phone and perhaps even on your headset, listening to the radio comment
tree of what you've just seen.
Um, so I think we're moving into the fourth industrial revolution, which Florida talks
about where everything's very fluid and nothing.
You can have aggregation of content, but we're not really so much talking about channels
now.
Um, we're talking about getting data to people in the way that they want to.
Um, so if we, if we, if we are totally dissatisfied, um, and we've got fantastic storytellers working
with programmers, I'm working with, um data analysts to analyzing the data data
use.
Then we're starting to get nearer to what Carolyn Cooper bits argued well,
his vision for public service media 3.0, which he envisioned in 2010, which has an ability
to operate at national and international levels, um, to reflect multiculturalism because you
can have segments of the audience who either indicated.
They like particular things or the public service media could say, if you like this,
you like this.
Um, so this supports multimedia reality and also texts and Paratek, so you can have
a David Attenborough film and then you have Peratech's, which could be various
elements of different commentaries, different photographs, different different ways
of experiencing that, the, the texts, the original texts which could suit
disabled people or people who might need a bit more explanation or simpler technology
to view on.
So this brings us to using datafication for universal access.
Um, Necessarily universal appeal, but it also might enhance the universal appeal as well
as universal access.
And this this approach is obviously could, if you get it right, you can be technologically
neutral.
Um, so I wanted to talk about the inter operable mastering format, which is a new
standard broadcast standard.
It came from the film industry very much adopted by Netflix in 2016.
And it's been adopted a lot and, you know, lost Los Angeles.
No, you know, the big filmmaker centers of film production, but It's basically you
put into a container, all the components of a particular brand or a particular media
or communications to experience into a big box.
And there's all been mapped with metadata instructions and it can be pulled out in different
ways.
Um, so you could have an airline version of Dave that and breasts the blue planet.
You could have a mobile phone version, you could have a television version, you could
have a gate gamified version and you could have different commentary for different
territories, different age groups, different segments.
I know in Canada last, the broadcasting is quite, you know is, can be, needs to
be quite segmented, to appeal to different types of groups and different languages.
Um, so this is how it works.
Um, you inputs on the left, you can see all the videos, subtitles, artwork, metadata,
gaming, whatever you want to put in.
Um, and then it's mastered so that everything is crunched together in different types of
bundles of assets to suit the play out.
It's coded trans coded, and then it's outputted.
And it's various different streams.
When I worked at BBC R and D I worked next to the I player team in the early days
of the eye player.
They got it, got to the point where they were recoding and transcoding for up to 36 different
screens devices.
Um, just, you know um, receiving devices.
And it was just taking so much time.
Um, So I think we're in the same way, media flows can be recombined.
Audiences can also be recombined.
They can be segmented, but they can also be recombined into large scale experiences.
So you can have a mass, a group or an individual experience, and you could be accessing from
different locations.
So you could get all the sports fans together for a particular game quite easily.
And then just, just like we're doing on zoom, actually, you could have breakout groups,
all these sorts of things, manifest calls, these kinds of adjustments, digital compositing.
Um, so when McKayla and I picked our 10 cities, we wanted to pick Toronto and Hamilton Waterloo.
We wanted to pick Ontario and CBC.
Um, so we looked at the CBC news story and I particularly enjoyed.
Several senior managers from CBC to, to ask them about their strategy and also
the barriers to evolution.
Um, I talked to one senior manager who described what he felt was happening, that they were
moving.
There was this new mobile first strategy that came out.
Um, and at first there was a big, there was resistance to this because the new storm had
just been con reconfigured from being television and radio to be a multimedia newsroom.
So the journalists had got used to being multimedia and you in the BBC's experience, you can know
about television, but perhaps not.
Radio is, it's almost impossible to be a mixed media journalist because you learn your
craft.
All the Chinese had to ask to conceive the broadcast.
So they, the distribution of all the material as a river of different kinds of media to
live to the mobile phone.
Um, and this came off the back of um, what what Melissa has been talking about
actually in 2012 the Kitchener Waterloo area of Toronto was providing CBC, was providing
radio with digital components.
So it was radio first with Peratech's, if you like with appendages that were digital
webpages, maybe some tweeting some early social media or not so early actually, but you know,
some rather primitive, perhaps social media.
And then along come the local web pages strengthening the local content in 2014.
Um, and then this huge explosion of um, radical reinvention of the news from digital
only mobile first river of content, 2016.
Um, so they changed their operating methods, their philosophy, there was very, very slow
cultural reorganize reorientation, and it was seen as a threat.
It was also seen as another channel.
So the mindset was still channel oriented rather than seeing things as deliver to in
different ways at different times, young people, um, Vic Victor grassmilk who I did some
work w uh, did some work with recently was that a conference with recently?
And he's been doing so.
Work on what is public service media?
3.0 as well.
Um, and we asked him to look at young people, how young people see measure as a
cloud of different experiences.
Um, and they, they see it as a media verse, a sort of different experiences clustered
around a brand or story through which you can get your message across as a public service,
major outlets.
Um, so young, particularly young people, age 14 to 16 are using measure in different ways.
So a group of us are looking including uh, Charles Davis from rice and university,
Christine hoarse from the applied university of cologne and myself.
We're looking at some young people's media use because the BBC asked us to specifically
look at 14 to 16 year olds.
Because they're finding it very difficult to cater for this new, with this age group
who used measure in different ways.
But however, if you get it right, once senior manager at CBC said to me, they were seeing
a threefold or triple digit increase in the volume of daily visits to mobile.
So when they were getting it right, it was really increasing the traffic.
So Mikayla and I have you, if you're interested in seeing our findings that's
where you can find them.
Um, we see the need desperate need, really urgent need for internal reorganization.
And CBC is one of the public service media.
Who've been very courageous about this.
Um, They may be failing in other areas, but they've been really courageous and really
going for it.
We were really impressed.
Um, and this river of media, this reinvention of content to think of it, not in channels,
but as a flow going in different directions.
I think, you know, Miquel and I thought was, was moving towards the fourth industrial revolution
and going in the right direction.
But what it requires externally is media clustering is basically instead of public service media
being in large statement buildings, they need to be where the technologists are.
They need to be whether creatives and the gamers are the people creating games and social
media.
They need to cluster with new high technology and new kinds of creative firms to accelerate
this internal internal change.
And they need to have new partner relationships.
You can't just commission anymore.
You have to be working with people creatively, internally, mixed media, working, not multimedia
journalists, but people doing their own specialism next to somebody else who is a specialist.
I mean, another type of storytelling, new partnership frameworks, not just commissioning
and that needs many people, not just a commissioning editor, but many people who their job is to
help public service media folk, producers work with other producers and complete
datafication through the whole system.
Um, so I just wanted to, you know, we've all already mentioned this book, but if you're
interested in it That's what I've just presented is in there alongside other
folks contributions you know, Phillips up Savage um, really, you know, it was
one of the three people leading on the book, so I recommend it.
Thanks.
He really amazing broad view of things.
Um, I've heard a number of some of what you've said about this before, but a really interesting
overview of what's going on.
Um, is there anyone with a an immediate comment or a quick question for Lizzie at
this point?
Yeah, I was going to say speaking to the idea that, that, that new media was initially a
threat to journalism.
Um, that was the case with CDC, according to Wade Roland in 19 97, 97, CBC had less
than a dozen people working with online activities, working to develop
online avenues of distribution.
So it's in, I remember the neighbor, they were like all in one room too.
Uh, and then the other thing I was going to say, it's really interesting, this idea of
data going back and forth.
Um, because I think with a lot of the public broadcast is or at least with CBC
the interested in operating on multi-platforms partly because they can collect that data.
So at, at the same time, while there's various kinds of content being contents being
packaged and repackaged and tailored to different user experiences, The people who develop the
apps for CBC are also developing user profiles.
And those are different than actual people.
Like they're, they're, they're developing, uh, they're, they're accumulating large amounts
of data to try to imagine and project how users might be navigating through these
online applications.
So it's not just that they're trying to package and repackage content for different
users, but they're actually imagine users differently.
Imagine them in a lot of ways.
I think as packets of data has as anyway, as a sock, maybe in the side, Yeah.
And what you say is an interesting sort of correspondence with what Lizzie has been saying
at the limits to that, the effects of that she talks about it in terms of some of the
effective aspect of that, that can be useful as well.
Um, okay.
So next up taking a uh, a slight turn in terms of someone who represents some of
those audiences who get programmed, and it's a great pressure to have done open arms
with us from identify, are you identifying yourself as from the center for international
governance, innovation, but also friends of Canadian broadcasting?
Yeah.
CGS listening.
I'd love a fellowship, but I don't have one yet.
So just friends of Canadian broadcasting for now.
Uh, great.
Well, thank you very much, Phillip, and to the rest of the panelists.
Um, unlike my esteemed colleagues here, I dropped out of grad school.
And so I'm afraid that my English may be much more plain and my analysis perhaps much
more simple but hopefully provides a, an applied perspective which can compliment
the the, the great and illustrious expertise on offer from the, from the other panelists
today.
Uh, just by way of context, the friends of Canadian broadcasting is an independent not-for-profit
organization.
We've been around since 1985.
Friends is not associated affiliated with the CBC in any way.
Um, we don't take any money from them or any other media company print broadcast, or any
corporation at all.
For that matter, we are a 100% citizen funded.
And though we do support and advocate on behalf of a truly public CBC,
which is public, both in ownership, financial reality, but also in nature and character.
Um, we sometimes have an antagonistic relationship with the CBC as well in cases where they
deviate from their from their public purpose and the spirit and, and then
sometimes even the, the letter of the broadcasting act.
And so our interest here really is about preserving this non-commercial public space in the digital
era.
The CBC is the single.
Public space that all Canadians can inhabit together and with a country that must
retain some sense of unity across such great physical distance.
This is of course, a very important function.
In the in the maintenance of our, of our sovereignty and independence.
And so that, that really is our, our concern is how to maintain this shared space.
And as we know the CBC is basically the only media organization in the country there,
of course, a couple of other not-for-profit organizations, but most of them, um most
media in the country will speak to you or see the audience as a consumer to be
manipulated or sold.
Uh, and there are relatively few places that treat the audience as a citizen to be served,
honored, respected, and informed.
Um, and so this is, this is why we, we, we play such a high importance on it.
So when we talk about CBC in the digital platforms, I think of this in two ways, on the one hand,
we're thinking about the CBC itself and its use of digital.
And on the other hand, it's relationship to existing platforms, companies like
Facebook with which it has commercial agreements and even something like Netflix,
which may not fall into the category of digital platforms in the way that you're thinking
about it.
But also has commercial implications for the CBC.
And as far as I can see, or at least see right now I would put my thoughts
into three buckets, three questions, three problem areas that, that arise for the
CBC and at the CBC really needs to address, but that all of us as well as a, as a
voting public, as an audience also have an interest and a role in addressing.
So I think the first is legitimate.
There are parties that will allege that.
For example, the CBC has no legal mandate to be engaged in digital activities.
Um, many of these are self interested competitors.
Um, I'm thinking of Quebec whore, for example, which has recently made representations to
the, to the broadcast regulator in camp.
Uh, to this effect, but even though it's, um, a claim without merit, it is still
a claim that, that appears often.
And so there is, there is a question about legitimacy that I think the CBC needs
to make sure it can always address with credibility.
And unfortunately the CBC's actions in response to these types of accusations have,
um, leave a lot to be desired.
In some cases I'm thinking for example, of, uh initiatives like tandem, the
large sponsored content initiative, which gained a lot of controversy in Canada over.
Uh, 16,000 supporters of the friends of Canadian broadcasting signed a petition calling for
tandem to be stopped arguing that CBC's digital properties should not be one massive advertorial.
Uh, but the CBC is legitimacy is really predicated upon its distinctiveness, its distinctiveness
in its public service orientation and having a hyper commercialization mandate
and management team really does undermine that legitimacy.
And unfortunately it gives critics like Mr. Pelito self-interested though they may be,
um an advantage that perhaps they don't warrant on the merits of their argument alone.
I think the same can be true of the requirement to have people, um Uh, to sign up for
gem obviously personalization, data mining, et cetera can be considered valuable
activities.
Um, they're competing the CBC with many services that are offering personalized selection as
a, as a, as a core part of their value proposition.
But this does also compromise universality.
And, and again, the reason why these companies call it collect this data is for purpose.
Commercial advancement and personal manipulation.
And so does the, can the CBC make the argument that these same techniques can be used towards
more beneficial?
Uh, and, and finally, in terms of legitimacy, I think we have to look really closely yeah.
Collaborations with some of the, the large American companies Catherine Tate
the president of the CDC famously with both feet in her mouth compared Netflix
to the British Raj.
Um, and, and, and, you know, abruptly ended hall oh, productions with Netflix causing
shows like Anne with an E for example, to be discontinued much to the chagrin of over
one and a half million people around the world, who've called for it to be reinstated through
a petition.
But we also know that CVC has commercial agreements with Facebook.
Facebook's representatives have testified to that effect.
We don't know exactly the nature of those agreements, but we do know that Facebook is
basically the antithesis of what the CBC ought to be.
Um, its commitment to public service is negligible, its commitment to transparency.
Political dialogue is zero.
Um, and and it's it's collection of data, et cetera, around content for the CBC is problematic.
And so these commercial agreements with the devil as deals with the devil tend to be,
um, raise some questions about legitimacy that I think need to be addressed.
The second bucket is money will the CBC enough money to compete.
And what are the financial implications of this, of this digital era in which we find
ourselves as of 2018, which is the most recent data that we have.
The CBC was 18 out of 20 comparable OCD countries in terms of funding for public broadcasting
at an average of $33 per person per year, uh, compared to the industrial average of
about a hundred dollars in the tops being the Nordics, that 1 71 80 kind of territory,
most of these countries, of course like the BBC, for example at about $100 per person
per year are serving more or less one time zone in one language with some exceptions
and smaller services.
Um, whereas with, and they have twice as many people.
So three times per capita, twice as many people, so six times as much money.
So with one sixth of that money, the CBC has to have services covering six times zones
to radio and to TV in English and French, each plus digital services in English and
French, each, and a Northern service in English, French, and eight indigenous languages
that is not free.
And the fact that the CBC is able to maintain this level of service is great.
When we look at the general trends, especially when it comes to fictional programming
you can't stretch this dollar forever.
The CBC testified at its licensed renewal hearings that it spends two-ish million dollars,
uh, per hour of original production.
On a, on a, on a good day.
Um, we know that Netflix on some of its biggest shows is spending 13, 14, 15 CEO Reed
Hastings has said $20 million an hour is not out of the question.
Uh, how can you compete when global exploitation, um, allows some of your competitors to achieve
a scale that is so much greater?
I mean, the CDC used to be competing against American studios for American audiences.
Now it's a global game, 2 million versus 20 million.
It's hard to to find that many you know, value store hits that can really
break through, although they have managed to do it to some extent, there's also the
issue of technical labor costs as software developers are, you know, in great shortage.
Uh, they cost a lot of money more than camera operators, et cetera.
So developing this technical infrastructure is no small feat and adds additional
financial pressures.
The response through pay walling.
For example, again comes to the legitimacy question about universality and, and
also just drives audience.
In some cases away, we have this, you know, terrible situation in which the worst awful
most, you know, false content is free on Facebook and the best, most accurate interesting
content is you know, available to paying subscribers for, you know, the New York times,
the financial times a globe and mail Netflix, et cetera.
Um, and the CBC could potentially be a bridge for for people without the financial
means to have maintained four or five, six paid subscriptions to still have content of
comparable quality.
Um, how's that gonna work when we're, when we're pay walling and when we're advertising
so aggressively, like the pre-roll ads on CVC are absolutely insufferable they're way
more aggressive than than what the private broadcasters are doing.
The banner ads are amazing.
Um, it's, it's it's really, it's really a threat to the character and legitimacy,
but also accessible the ability of the CBC.
The other financial pressure of course is, um, is service production.
In Toronto alone, I believe we make over $2 billion a year worth of film and television
product.
Most of that is American content for big American studios driving up the price of creating domestic
Canadian content.
Um, while it's good for the industry it may not be good for the country for us
to become a factory for somebody else's culture.
Um, which seems to be the route that we've taken, driving up costs for everybody.
The CBC in particular, there are some answers to this on the horizon including policies
to require companies like Google and Facebook to pay Canadian journalists, journalism organizations
for their news as has been done in Australia at the Australian public broadcaster
was captured in the mandatory news bargaining code.
That's positive.
There are also other creative ideas, for example, um, requiring that over the top streaming
services like Netflix, which.
Hopefully soon to be regulated in Canada, um, can perhaps make, you know, be entered
into co-production agreements with the CBC again as as a way of meeting
their license obligations towards the CB to the CRTC, you know, maybe instead of saying
you have to contribute 20% of your revenues to financing Canadian content, we can say
maybe it's 15, but the CBC gets first run.
There are ways that we could potentially do these types of things to provide external
financing to the public broadcaster from these other sources and perhaps the commercialization
would be the quid pro quo that, you know, getting out of advertising would, would
allow this to happen.
And the final set of challenges I say are in the interview.
Um, RIT writ large, you know, the rest of the news industry and the broadcasting
industry in Canada is in a death spiral, right?
The private television workforce in Canada over the last 10 years has been cut in half
since 2016.
We've lost nearly 20,000 journalism jobs in Canada, print broadcast et cetera.
Um, in 2019, before the pandemic, almost half of commercial radio stations in Canada operated
at a loss.
And that was before the pandemic drove the price of advertising even further into the
ground.
And so we face this situation in which the CBC is not only cash strapped and kind of
imperiled, but it will be cash strapped, imperiled, and the last man standing in many places,
um, putting even further strains and adding even more expectations with no increase for
funding.
We also have other policy questions, like for example, will targeted behavioral advertising
continue to be legal.
Um, my position is that it should be completely strictly banned.
Um, like other socially destructive business models, child slavery was also very profitable,
but Alaska bad for the world you know, will this continue?
And how will that affect the competitive environment?
Um, will the private media that survive have paywalls that are so strict and so strong
that you know, more audiences come to the CBC we'll, you know, Facebook continue
to accelerate.
The de-legitimized nation of media and public service in general, by amplifying the activity
of, of you know, incendiary far-right figures who we know get far better treatment,
um, and, and far greater amplification from platforms like Facebook.
So these are things that are outside of the CBC's control, but that scholars like
yourselves citizens, like, like the forensic Canadian broadcasting can, can champion and
pay attention to.
So I would say in terms of the way forward and in closing I would, I would just
add a few points.
First.
We need supportive public policy and adequate funding for the public broadcaster period.
And this is especially true, given the wider collapse in the media.
We can get creative.
This doesn't all have to come from general treasury.
Like I said, this can come from a monopoly tax.
Like the one that was created in Australia, it can come through kind of compulsory co-production
agreements.
Uh, it can come through a tax on behavioral advertising, you know in the same way
that cigarette taxes, finance public health efforts.
We can say that the damage from targeted behavioral advertising can finance public information
efforts.
So we definitely have some opportunities there, but we need to set our minds to it in
earnest.
And right now that is not happening.
Even the new broadcasting act says nothing about the CDC, which is Canada's central broadcaster.
Second, the legitimacy questions need to be addressed and they need to be addressed solidly.
And in perpetuity, this means that CBC, especially English services need to get out of advertising.
The financial records show that advertising for the CBC is a decreasingly necessary evil.
In other words the time in which the cost of selling the ads will outpace the revenue
gain from the ads is probably only two or three years into the future.
And so despite several decades of commercialization schemes that were meant to win over audiences
and, you know transform the commercial fortunes of the CBC, none of those have worked
trying again will also not work.
All it does is piss people off.
And so the, the, the end of ads is an inevitability and we need to find a way to
do it responsible, no tracking as well.
And you know, the CBC should be an exploitation free zone.
They shouldn't be playing with these tools that Facebook and Google.
Are playing with.
Instead, we should be working to demonstrate that there are responsible alternatives and
that those other tools are nefarious and potentially illegitimate.
And in my opinion should be banned.
And finally, the CBC needs greater independence.
The board of directors of the CBC cannot hire or fire the president of the CVC, the, the
board and the president are political appointees that other jobs to the prime minister, this
is just a bad system that most other respectable countries have avoided.
And we're Canada, a serious country.
We would avoid it too.
And finally, we need to remember that the CBC is a central institution supporting Canadian
stories, and this word story seems fluffy, but it includes journalism and includes culture.
If we get the majority of our culture from a country in which a significant number of
people think it's acceptable to bring a gun to a kindergarten, we are going to have a
problem and journalists.
Fictional storytelling that talks about our history and our reality, and our future allows
us to pick our own path forward, which may be different to the path of the United States.
That's what independence looks like.
The CBC was founded in 1932 by a conservative prime minister who recognized the importance
of this new, powerful tool called radio to instill a national consciousness in an,
in, in, in shrine and, and engage with people to build a national identity.
And that purpose is true today.
And so anything that we do with respect to the CVC needs to keep this importance in mind
and all of this just adds to the urgency, uh, in my opinion of what I've laid out.
So thank you for your patience and for inviting me today, I'm happy to discuss if there is
anything to discuss and if not, I'll just shut up.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Um, and thanks for mentioning RV Bennet.
Um, we don't hear enough about that great discussion.
Um, all right.
Uh, so in the interest of time and to make sure that Chris gets a chance to tell his
story go ahead, Chris.
Sorry, Christopher.
All right.
Thank you, Philip.
I appreciate that.
Good to be with everybody.
I almost feel like I'm I'm back home today.
I'm just going to share my screen back home in Canada.
All right.
So increasingly provide knowledge to government that is required
or play a role in
providing growth in jobs or providing service.
That sound is coming from.
If anyone who is not speaking could please mute that would help.
All right.
There we go.
So you can see can you see it now?
My my screen,
hold on.
We could earlier.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Got it.
Brilliant.
Okay.
Thank you everybody.
Due to the brevity of this talk.
I've had to cut out a lot of stuff about obviously public service media, and platformization
as well as the context, important context regarding CBC radio and the history of CBCs
engagement podcasts.
So if you're interested in that, it may be up later during the chat or the Q and a, or,
um, or afterwards as well by email.
So in today's brief talk, I'll briefly address the CBC's engagement with podcasting and then
discuss what the increasing platformization of podcasting suggests about the CBC's position
in the Kennedy and ma uh, media escape.
I'm going to argue that the case of podcasting and the CBC exemplifies.
The institution's gradual displacement in a mediascape increasingly dominated by digital
platforms and suggest that this dynamic has been exacerbated by both the CBCs policies
and a lack of clear, but the political direction from federal regulators.
And I'm going to conclude by suggesting some potential policy or directions the organization
might impact as part of a broader attempt to first redefine its role in Canadian society.
And second shorts long-term viability in a digital media escaped and characterized by
extreme competitiveness and intensive commercialization.
So Canadians love podcasting.
According to Edison research, you can see here 37% of the committee, all populations
listen to podcasts every month in 2020 despite a slow start with podcasting, the
CBC has experienced success in the project testing arena with 11.2 million active downloads
per month, as of late 2019.
And we look at it offerings, the CBC has done really well with this guesting operation in
terms of showcasing diversity in emerging voices and pushing them outwards into
international spaces is another example of some of those.
Uh, it's also done a really good job.
Monetizing its audio offerings and that's of course, a controversial issue as we've
already kind of discussed and may discuss more later in 2019 and partner with Triton
digital to India, agent dynamic ad insertion, to maximize the revenue generated by its podcast
offer.
So podcasts has been a key vehicle for, for taking the audio offerings, CBC producers
and commercializing them something that wasn't possible, of course, with terrestrial radio,
uh, due to a regular regulatory prohibition.
Having said that though here as elsewhere, the CBC is primarily focused on content, taking
on an uncritical and unreflective approach to making it and that content available wherever
Canadians and others wish to access it as, uh, miles and, and Daniel have already kind
of touched on really the.
Policy approaches being let's just make it available everywhere, no matter what the values
of those given platforms or institutions might be.
So, you know, the CBC is of course on Spotify and it has been for a couple of years.
Uh, you can see, you can pretty much listen to any, any CBC podcasts you want on Spotify.
Um, it's also on YouTube.
Here's an example.
Someone knows something they've uploaded all their episodes.
So, you know, you can access all of the CBCs audio offerings with that without ever actually
having to enter CBC space.
Uh, something that really mirrors the, again, the broader approach that CBC has taken to
third-party platforms and something that I think, and we've heard from others as well
here today threatens to gradually undermine the city, the CBC's legitimate legitimacy
and displace it as a preeminent media institution in Canada.
Okay.
When I'm talking about platformization today and the platformization of podcasting, the
key thing here is that I think this is going to soon become more of a practical issue for
the CBC because we're reaching a point where podcasting is no longer solely and perhaps
even primarily about content because it is being platformized through the
emergence of institutions like Spotify and it's entry into the podcasting sector
YouTube as a primary site for the engagement with podcasts, Amazon music, and now Sirius
is getting into that space as well.
So these are going to soon become both primary access points for podcasts and also prime
movers in terms of shaping the industry and also consumer demand or user demand, we might
say for certain types of podcasts.
So we're looking at this here, again, research from From a signal hill insights
here.
Uh, how do people access podcasts in Canada as of May, 2020 while YouTube is a big one,
apple podcasts, of course, Spotify the cider or the app of the people who produce
the podcast, which might be CBC, listen to your, in this case.
And then some other ones you can see it really is increasingly about these
about these platforms.
And we look at.
We've got a platform like Spotify, for example, moving into the podcast space with its established
user bases bodies of information about its users, the ability to monetize those users,
and also actively nudge those users into consuming certain types of content, shake their behavior.
Um, and they have a lot of resources.
So they've been acquiring content, you know, they started with the platform and now
they're heading into the content, right?
And so Spotify bought Gimlet, purchased the rights to Joe Rogan serious just the other
day acquired 99% invisible I'm Roman Mars, um, you know, pretty canonical public
service Republic, public radio podcast about design.
Amazon has purchased wondering we also see.
Not a lot of the key creators and producers as individual podcast creators, I should say,
are leaving legacy institutions like the CBC NPR and the BBC to go to these companies and
their subsidiaries which can offer a lot of money and also creative freedom.
So it's platforms here looking to consolidate their positions within the.
Within the, the podcasting space, Spotify has acquired the podcast creation software
app anchor in 2019.
Uh, something that makes it really easy for those who are aspiring to create podcasts,
to go to Spotify as a kind of one-stop shop for creation exhibition and monetization.
Uh, and recently both Spotify and apple podcasts announced plans to roll out podcast monetization
services to allow creators to directly charge subscribers or in the parlance of Spotify
followers.
And NPR actually is set to collaborate with both these initiatives.
And finally, a Spotify has just announced preliminary plans as well.
For a new initiative that will enable users to plug Spotify content directly into Facebook.
And this is a product I think that has the potential to finally the crack, the code on
the creation of quote unquote social audio experiences, which have been difficult to
engineer in a meaningful way.
Um, now, now someone said, of course at the CDC has its own platform for podcasts
and audio content, CBS.
She listen, and this is true.
Uh, it's successful as a consolidated space for all the CBC's audio offerings from library
radio to music to podcasts.
The problem though, Is that preliminary research suggests that listen is most popular with
all CBC listeners.
In other words, the kinds of people used to tap into CBC radio all day long and listen
for all their audio, your media needs.
Uh, younger listeners are moving to, or kind of always already being at those other platforms
that are not necessarily going to be swayed and drawn into CBC.
Listen, because you know, as soon as you listen is, is only CBC content, it doesn't offer,
um, other things.
So this is a significant issue, right?
The core problem here is that the CBC has been reduced to the status of complimentary.
And in fact has embraced this status.
This is a new term that David Morgan told me was point I'll bring in from.
Business and management literature to address the role of institutional users on major platforms
like your Facebook, your Spotify, YouTube, you name it.
The CBC effect is a kind of a super user that is they're engaging with, as we've already
heard from miles and, and, and Daniel its own kind of revenue sharing
and, and data sharing agreements with the platform, but effectively is operating on
a secondary level.
It doesn't really control the interface here.
So there are a number of issues, right?
Obviously, lack of control over the policies that govern presentation and functioning
of CBC materials in these spaces.
Uh, potential value conflicts, as we've already heard.
Um, as these platforms are predicated upon practices associated with surveillance, capitalism,
don't really have time to fully expand on that now, but I think people are probably,
uh, heard a fair bit about that already.
And these things may be seen as Daniel just mentioned quite quite concisely and eloquently
to to conflict and run counter to the CBC's public service mandate.
And at the moment, the CBC is effectively, uh, complicit with its status, given its status
as a complimentary.
The platform neutral approach as the podcast, um, situation illustrates is, is fine
as a means of connecting with your users and citizens.
But what happens when the platforms are not neutral and their values may be, seem to conflict
with the, the values that you yourself, as an institution ostensibly represent another
issue is brand.
Or as I prefer to say in this context, identity, annihilation users are engaging with CBC content
through intermediate, intermediate, and platforms, and thus forming connections with programs
and their hosts and potentially the platforms, but not necessarily with the producing organization.
And then the increased difficulty in holding onto talent as massive companies snap
up the best creators.
I talked about this a little bit before, but we've seen this with Jonathan Goldstein, creative
wiretap, moving to Gimlet to do heavyweight Connie Walker.
Uh, you know, famous journalists doing a lot of excellent work on indigenous issues in
Canada, of course just recently went to Gimlet and has begun now to, to produce programs
for them.
And then finally, a potential loss of legitimacy.
And Daniel just covered this quite nicely, but this dynamic, I think really reflects
how hostile commentators and regulators may eventually renewed calls to defend the
CBC and either just, you know, be done with public public funding for media altogether
or give its money directly to creators.
And as Daniel was saying, it's easy to poke holes in this discourse.
I think there are good counter arguments to be made, but nevertheless, it is a discourse
that is increasingly prominent.
And I think increasingly carrying weight, um, in the public consciousness, in the, the,
the civics fear, if you like.
So I think this is coming to a critical point right now because the CBC is so dependent
upon these external platforms.
Um, You really risk.
I think de-legitimizing the institution in the eyes and ears.
If you will, of younger viewers listeners, and we're going to form the next audience
for the institution, as well as the taxpayers and regulators, and must continue to support
it.
Um, and I think this is exposing the flaws and the CBCs sort of uncritical and unreflective
embrace of all manner of platforms from Facebook to YouTube, to Spotify that are fundamentally
beyond it's beyond its control.
So I've got a few ideas for things that the CDC might do in the spirit of the conference
to improve things.
And I'll, I'll wrap up with these.
So above all.
CBC needs to figure out of course who it is and what it should be as we probed right now,
there are a lot of tensions between some of the normative arguments we have for public
service media that are still strongly associated with the CBC and how the CBC actually operates.
And I think that it really needs to determine, you know, what it wants to be as a means of
preparing it to take an active role in the shaping of the next broadcasting act and establishing
for itself a more advantageous regulatory dynamic with its overseeing agencies.
The CDC will not be able to compete with major platforms and companies for top talent.
I should focus on Canadian talent and specifically on emerging voices, finding and developing
new cases, the talent, and then pushing it outwards to other parts of the country and
foreign markets as well.
Uh, shouldn't seek to compete with the most expensive things.
Uh, the CBC labs, as we've seen here to seek advertising digital spaces certainly
that's the case with podcasting.
They seem to be pot positively giddy at the prospect of monetizing audio offerings for
the first time.
However, as the Yale report.
CBC radio is Canada seemed to see when new Canada's ability to transform itself successfully
into a public media institution.
With the distinct features we have highlighted is somewhat compromised by its continuing
to reliance on advertising, which necessarily introduces a commercial imperative insurance
decision-making.
So in the case of podcasting, we know that users enjoy, or at least often don't terribly
mind advertisements.
The, the research is quite clear on this.
People actually tend to like, especially host read ads.
They're not as intrusive as conventional advertisements at the same time.
There's the aforementioned risk that the commercial imperative here and perhaps more importantly.
The potential loss of, of a basis for the CBC do distinguish distinguish itself in a
crowded marketplace, might eventually undermine, um, its ability to function in that environment.
There's also the, kind of the issue of the double commercial imperatives here, where
the CBC in its capacity as complimentary, or is subject to the commercial imperatives
that a platform like Spotify or YouTube might have, which may or may not be in alignment
with what the CBC wants to do, but certainly are, are beyond the CBCs influenced to
a significant degree.
Finally, on the specific question platforms, I wanted to introduce this quotation from
Catherine Tate, and I think it resonates quite nicely with what Daniel was saying earlier
miles as well.
You know, talking about the nature of public spaces, safe, trusted public spaces,
and the notion that this is what public media can provide.
The CBC, I don't think has actually been doing a very good job of, of doing this, especially
with respect to its kind of platform, neutral approach to getting its content out there
and engaging.
And I think the case of podcasts that illustrates that the organization must determine how it
wants to proactively shape its relationship with commercial platforms with which
it is increasingly integrated.
This is clearly an issue on news information side as David terrorists, of course, would
Ella observe in the end of the CBC, but also here for podcasting.
This is an existential question.
And then CBC needs to think about it's its own values and how they relate to these platforms.
Probably it needs to create a, do a more meaningful effort at creating its own platform that might
act as a kind of a public service competitor.
And I've elsewhere talked a lot about what public service platforms might look like.
That's conversations beginning to happen all over the world now, thankfully but with
respect to podcasts, One idea would be to, uh, expand on podcast playlist, which is a
CBC show that highlights all kinds of podcasts from all over the world, not just CBC stopped.
So take this logic, bring it to CBC, listen and bring the curatorial work that the CBC
is doing, where it's able to leverage its identity as a trusted force in the world,
escaped both in Canada and abroad and use that to really make itself a resource
for public service podcasts, potentially highlighting podcasts that you wouldn't otherwise find
elsewhere.
Uh, and really kind of drawing people in with something that is different and distinctive
and making a real contribution to Canadian civic life and also to a broader multinational
media verse beyond what it's doing now, which is unfortunately kind of reducing it
to being something that is very similar to what other things that are already out there,
including hate to say it, but a lot of commercial things that are already out there
as well.
So I see these as exciting ideas.
And to my mind, they offer the best possible chance of ushering in a fruitful new era for
the CBCs audio programming division, and really the CBC more broadly.
Uh, but this can only happen if the CBC can both obtain clarity from regulators regarding
this mandate and funding going forward, and also perhaps, you know, most critically
and engage in a process of Ernest self-reflection that might result in a revitalized and unified
institutional mission for the platform paradigm.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Christopher.
Um, we have just under 10 minutes left and I wanted to offer at this point a chance for
anyone who is not a presenter who is dying to ask a question of any of the presenters.
So if anyone wants to unmute and have pose a quick question or comment now is your
time.
Um, I'll put a general one out there, which is just to ask any of the letters today.
And they were all very interesting.
Assuming the same pot of money is available for the CPC in the next, say two or three
fiscal years, the cost of developing and maintaining a platform where the cost of content moderation
is very high.
What would you shift?
Where would you shift resources to allow for the creation of a platform that would be in
competition with some various stablish ones and content moderation has been an ongoing
issue for a number of legacy organizations, as well as, as the CBC, in terms of the commentary
devolves much more quickly than you might like sometimes.
So I'm curious where you would shift the resources.
To make these things happen.
You know, you sounded a little bit like a CRTC commissioner from some of those,
the money question, the resource question is a good one where we just shifted what people
question, isn't it.
I mean, hope that's so much money.
And if you're putting more of it to the back end to building the platforms, to the distribution
and the con, you know, competing, you don't have as much money to develop talent or put
talent out there.
It's just, there's only so much.
And how do you, how do you create that?
I mean, it's an ongoing situation that the patient is dealing with right now.
So among the panelists, anyone, yeah, this is, this is the key question that the BBC
faced.
I was their online community manager for about seven years.
And that was the, it was the big, the money was going up the whole time.
So everybody, the BBC was very keen to have messaged calls, live chats, chat runs.
We, we rolled them out for different programs that everything, but the moderation bell
was absolutely huge.
Um, and it kept going up as the, we opened different types of social media.
Um, we trained up the librarians and the BBC libraries to do the moderation.
That was 15 people.
When we first started, then we had to outsource it to a company and all these companies start
suddenly salsa to form that were specializing in moderation.
Then we start to segment it into filters of filtering out swear words and things like
that.
Um, and then we explored partnerships with the audience to trustees, to, as AOL
did to to try and get a partnership with the audience.
Um, and the bill became so correct.
Great.
The BBC's answer was to cut their internal social media and to move everything externally
onto different providers.
But the thing is what the BBC gave away was the use of user data, the user accounts.
Um, and we developed quite a lot of editorial policy on, on moderation and Publix moderation
for public service environments.
Um, I going forward, that's why I sort of argue that we should revisit things like
a public service algorithm.
You know, why not have something which is smart, intelligent.
If you like this, you like this.
Um, hence that's why I'm interested in IMF.
Then I met IMF format, which a lot of broadcasts are so starting to adopt now or have
been for the last five years.
Um, I think we have to have a mixture of automation.
Intelligent data, sourcing and selection.
Um, and also a job which I, in my PhD, I argued that the job of a presenter is a media ESSA.
Um, you know, it was mentioned that this, you know, w why not, there are some people
who are good mediators, and, but you could have somebody who's presenting out front and
somebody who's curating at their side in a different way.
So a mixture of intelligence infrastructure, and you still have to have the human element,
but that could be supplied by other people, other audience members, or in many different
ways.
I think it's the P it's a really key nut to crack.
And what I'm seeing is these that's why I'm getting into these young people, because
they're, they're looking.
W they created brick collage.
They're interested in brick collage instead of channels.
They're interested in aggregating stuff around a particular thing or a moment or an environment,
or I'm good.
I'm going to have to stop you at, at this before we go too deep into the brick collage.
But is there anyone else who has a burning question?
They want to ask any of the panelists
this point, if not, I think that there's, some of the panelists were looking other when
you were looking to um, sorry, other than Lizzy, who might have something to say
about that that notion that Marlene raised Chris.
Or, or Daniel, go ahead.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Um, I think that the, the question of allocation of resources is a good one.
And this is an area personally with which I'm greatly frustrated with the CBC.
Um, if, you know, there's the old joke that every Canadian has two jobs, their job and
running the CBC.
So, you know, I don't want it to fall victim to that, but if, if I were in charge of the
CDC, One of the things that I would do is say, here's what we can do with the money
we have.
If we have less money, here's what has to go.
And if we had more money, here's what we'd be able to do.
Now, the position of the CBC is that this constitutes lobbying and using its public
platform to influence politics.
I disagree, but that's, that's their view.
So I don't think they can do everything.
I don't think there is some magical reorientation that they can do to just achieve all these
things.
Um, and so we have to make choices and those choices should be made explicit and and
public.
And I think that's one of the areas where the CBC could do, could do better.
And also, I think, you know, Curry, Canadian support the CBC and they support funding for
the CBC.
They should make it clear what they're getting, what they would lose and what they stand to
gain.
Okay, thanks.
Any other final thoughts or comments, but the panelists?
Yeah, I mean, to follow up on what Daniel's saying, I think I think distinctiveness
is the key thing in terms of the spaces and the scene in which the CBC is going to operate.
So now they were quite eager as we all were to embrace social media because it was new
and exciting, but we know what it is now and we know how it operates and the CBC does as
well.
So it's time to revisit platform neutrality and really think about what they can do economically
with their own space.
So obviously they're not going to get off social media, but what about using social
media to promote CBC content and draw people back into CDC spaces that would then offer
a distinctive alternative instead of simply trying to use these platforms and also
offer something that is very similar to them as well.
I think there's a lot that they can do in terms of reorienting, how they're approaching,
what they're already doing based around content, but also thinking a little bit about
existing infrastructure in order to make themselves more distinctive and offer more.
That is going to be of value while also being there.
But that requires a vision and it requires people to grapple with what you call the existential
questions.
And to this extent we haven't seen that.
We've seen marketing, we've seen branding, we've seen little initiatives here.
Talk about technology, but what is this for something equivalent to a charter review,
the BBC would have we're lacking that we're lacking it.
Um, in statute we're lacking it in process and we're lacking a voluntary offering for
management as well.
And that makes it difficult for us to get on board as to exactly what this could be.
Well, look, thank you very much, everybody we've run out of time.
This has been a great.
Conversation series of conversations.
I thanks so much to all the panelists and thanks to all of the excuse me, all the
rest of you, who, who sat and listened to this.
And I hope that we'll be able to share some of this at some point further and maybe
have the conversation extend again.
It's been a real pleasure having you all here.
And we look forward to again more interesting discussion in some other
future venue.
Thanks.
Thanks, all of you.