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More TV Shows Online

// August 28th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // broadcasting

Canwest has announced that they’re going to be streaming some big name shows online this fall including House, Heroes, The Office, Deal or No Deal, Weeds, Knight Rider (the new series, not the old) and 90210 (also the new one). In addition, they’re going publishing additional webisodes and behind-the-scenes footage not available on TV.

Canwest already offers full episodes of certain shows on their specialty networks, but this marks a dramatic increase in high-profile shows the broadcaster is making available.

No doubt they are looking to compete with CTV’s broadband video library (which has streamed some popular shows in the past) as well as capture more ad revenue dollars in their pre-roll supported video player.

Speaking of their video player, Canwest currently uses the Maven platform for streaming video (which was bought by Yahoo! earlier this year), but they’ve recently undergone a competitive analysis of video players/CMS and last I heard consider Brightcove a possible replacement.

I haven’t reviewed Brightcove in a while, but I use Maven quite regularly and it’s a very problematic piece of software both from the publisher and end user perspective. So in addition to Canwest offering some great shows online this fall, it may be on an improved player. Great news for Canadians who love these shows but have online viewing habits.

Gemini Awards

// August 26th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // broadcasting

Today the final nominees for the 23rd annual Gemini Awards were announced online. CBC had tossed my name in the hat for a potential nomination in the Best Cross Platform Project, but alas I wasn’t named a final nominee.

However, a couple of shows that I was the Interactive Producer on are up for TV awards. (I’m not nominated in these as the television producers are the owners of these projects). Still, it’s great to see some of my colleagues in TV land getting props including those who work on Dragons’ Den which is up for Best Reality Program or Series and MuchMusic Video Awards 2007 which is nominated in three categories.

Congratulations and good luck to the finalists!

On a side note: am I the only one who thinks it odd that the 2007 Gemini Awards show is nominated for a 2008 Gemini?

New Media Olympic Coverage

// August 6th, 2008 // No Comments » // blogging, broadcasting, events

I’m flying to Winnipeg and I’ll be away from my computer until next week, but before I go, I had to at least mention what is going to be the best new media coverage of any Olympic Games ever.

The big story is NBC’s Olympic site which will cover over 2,200 hours of live video streaming highlighting 25 sports and 3,000 hours of on-demand video including highlights and replays. This is unprecedented online coverage and is substantially more than NBC Television will be providing. Add in photo galleries, athlete bios, statistics and nanogaming and there’s no denying that the for the first time, the best coverage of the Olympic games is going to be online.

NBC is taking a shotgun approach to see what works online and is using the popularity of the games to get some good data and testing under their belts. What they learn from this impressive experiment could put them ahead of other broadcasters for future projects. I’m thoroughly impressed at what they have planned.

Back in Canada our own official Olympic broadcaster is not doing too bad of a job with its new media coverage either. Streaming video will be available, but not nearly the same number of hours that NBC will be providing. They also have regularly updated Olympic headline and athlete blogs.

The IOC has placed extreme limitations on what athletes can blog during the games. Violation of the IOC’s blogging rules could have athletes, “withdraw(n) of such person’s Olympic identity and accreditation card” and, “taking legal action for monetary damages and imposing other sanctions.” With restrictions like these, it’s nice to see that athletes have bothered to blog at all.

Being a sucker for both the Olympics and new media makes this a really great games to watch, read and comment on. It’ll be interesting to see what other new media coverage will gain traction. I’m already watching the live blogging happening over at ScribbleLive.