Thursday, January 21, 2010

The CBC are whores who waste your taxpayer funding.

I'm not going to start on the fact that the CBC has not yet even given a date as to when they will be converting to digital ATSC broadcasting. While it'd be nice to be able to actually watch something my taxes go to (I refuse to pay for cable, and their analogue signal is complete shit) I can always watch things online on websites like youtube or even ctv has a website where I can watch some shows. While its not as good as the idea of having HULU sites work in Canada, mostly because the same corporations that don't produce canadian content want to spend billions on american content and replay it here, and have the CRTC in their pocket, at least its something. But the CBC can't even do THAT right.

The CBC, I've come to learn, uses Flash and offers some of their television shows online to watch. Beautiful. At least thats what I thought until I realized their flash implementation somehow doesn't allow for Linux users to use the site. Whats Linux you ask? It's a third option, different from Windows and Mac. Firefox started with Linux. Open Office essentially started with Linux. Linux is to operating systems what the aforementioned are to web browsers or office software. Completely free. Many Canadians use Linux, and for the CBC to not allow linux users on their website is disgusting at best and grossly insulting at worst.

Now, some intrepid Linux users have made Reddit posts and bug reports but the response to Linux users from CBC (As shown in that bug report filed by Paul North) was:

"Dear Paul,

We have checked with our technical staff, and unfortunately, as you point out, the new Flash player we are installing does not work on Linux systems. However it
does work on almost all other systems, including Windows and Mac. The number of systems that could not see the video in our new player is likely around the 1%
or less range.

We are not in a position to develop any workaround that would prevent revenue from being generated when users watch video on cbc.ca. Funding for CBC from
the government of Canada has not been growing, and the funds from Parliament (less than $40 per Canadian taxpayer per year) only cover part of the Corporations
broadcasting operations. I'm sorry you did not get an earlier response from CBC."

Parker Bishop
Communication Assistant
CBC Audience Relations


Paul North goes on to blame the Conservative government for underfunding the CBC, which was probably the CBC's goal all along for acting in this pathetic manner, when in reality CBC television has acted like CTV and Global for years. They even seem at times to resent having to produce Canadian content.

I like CBC Radio and the CBC radio side of things is brilliant. They even offer a tech show called Spark which I quite enjoy, and all of their shows are free to download as mp3 podcasts, non encumbered by drm.

However CBC TV is acting in a petulant and almost retarded manner, and the worst thing is it took one Linux using person 15 minutes to bang out a workaround for their problem here

they could easily fix this. Both the BBC and PBS have shown great efforts to work with and enhance their offerings to as many people as possible. The CBC however seems to think the audience will change their whole damn operating system however to suit them.

I suppose its better than if the CBC used fucking Microsoft Silverlight like TSN, however. Now those guys are worthless douchebags.

It's still not right to waste taxpayer money and then not give anything back, though. CBC TV. You worthless whores.

You know what the funniest thing about this is?

The CBC's website (like most of the internet) runs on Linux.

yeah.

Maybe if the CBC wants to continue being Canadas public broadcaster, they should consider broadcasting to the public. Free to Air, over the internet, whatever way possible.

Enough of this bullshit.

Call CBC audience relations at 1-866-306-4636. Even if you aren't a Linux user. This sort of bullshit shouldn't be tolerated by these pieces of garbage.

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