Topic: CBC video streams down?

[Bonk]

I've been trying to watch this show on elephants all week:

http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/Shows/The_Nature_of_Things/1242300217/ID=1616341924

But it just wont come up. (or anything else on the CBC anymore).

Can anybody else see it? (Canadian) If so, are you behind a router? and if so is UPnP enabled. (Does flash know about UPnP - it must...)

It used to work. Not sure what happened. I suspect they added a server into their flash viewer and since I am behind a router which their flash app cannot control perhaps they won't send the stream? I do not want to have to decompile their flash app and see what it is doing. I just want to watch the video. 

P.S. I have tried all of the browsers I have installed (IE, FF, Opera, Chrome, Iron, Safari, Konqueror, Aurora, + ... none of them work)

edit: interesting: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.5/+bug/455852
This has been going on for a year now, it seems it has just affected the windows platform now. Don't people get it? Flash is bad... just link the darn file. Is it so hard? We did this better in the 90s.

All the browsers have implemented security restrictions that have now broken their flash snooping and "protection". Oh for crying out loud it is just a darn TV program not the top secret plans to a military invasion, give it up already.

Soon it just wont be worth the bother anymore. TV is killing itself.

This guy is close to getting the CBC to work again,
http://tarek.org/cbc/
but it looks like they have locked him out. I'd like to see the source to his script. We need to replace the cbc website and get right to the streams. (I suspect this may all be related to the Fox takeover of the CBC - shocking sign of the times... our national broadcaster, now controlled by Fox  )

[Bonk]

Wow, the more I read, I have stumbled on to a real issue here.

I think I might try the python script on windows to see if that will let me watch my elephant video I want to see. (attached plus http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/flvstreamer)

You'd think a TV network would want its viewers to be able to see the content?  CTV does it quite well (except for all the sidebar flash ads that regularly BLUESCREEN windows vista)

Hopefully I'll have a cbc video player written by noon. Sheesh. What you have to go through to watch tv these days.

[Sirgod]

LOL.
Bonk is using Python, to poke around a program, to peruse something about Pachyderms.

That's a lot of "P" words.

Stephen

[Bonk]

That is amusing...  Unfortunately the CBC has plugged all these "holes". (actually now the only way to view their videos)

I've found the streams but the server rejects flvstreamer. I could do this but the heck with it. David Suzuki has long since sold out anyway. I feel so old.

Fine. The CBC is dead.

I've stopped reading their text news anyway. (Fox news content on cbc just does not sit well with me. For that matter, a pbs invasion would be equally disturbing - it was our national network)

Flash killed the CBC. Wow. Go Adobe! 

[FPF-Tobin Dax]

I figure Suzuki sold out when he was hawking flourescent light bulbs as green. They have mercury in them and how safely do you think the average consumer disposes of them? If you throw them in your garbage, you have just poisibed the environment. They break in the on the way to, or at the dump and put mercury in. Also, you can check on it, Break one of these bulbs in your home and you better call in a hazmat team.

For Bonk, conventional broadcasting in Canada is dying and Global and CTV etc did it to themselves. ( I work for one of them ) The major markets will survive, but the smaller markets aren't likely to.

[Bonk]

Bummer. I'm gonna miss the CBC. (The Suzuki sellout hurts too, I looked up to him as a kid.)

Maybe it is time to start the real SCTV? That would be awesome. Old fashioned broadcasts over the air, ones that you can watch on a CRT display and laugh and be entertained. That would be so cool. I think John Candy would approve.

I wonder how much an old transmitter would go for? Oh right, the CRTC won't allow it... they want the "airwidth" for the all important and unceasingly annoying, semifunctional exploitive and criminal cellular networks - right. I forgot. It looks so ridiculous in public. Everyone talking to no one, and saying nothing - at such a cost.

Maybe it will come back into fashion as a retro thing someday? We can hope.

[FPF-Tobin Dax]

CRTC would allow you to buy the station/transmitter, but then you would have to upgrade it to digital by august 2011. Then if you had the capital, you would have to dump in money to produce X amount of local candian content as well as meet candian content in your programming. Try to be profitable in a fragmented market. For global and CTV, they shot themselves in the conventional broadcasting area by buying and running specialty channels that get fixed income from subscribers and took away viewers from the over the air operations. They can't blame it all on satellite and cable companies. However, cable companies have gotten a free ride from the start in canada and it's time they coughed up something back to over the air broadcasters for repackaging us and selling us while giving us zero. In canada at least, cable in it's infancy got a free ride so that it could take hold and survive. They still think the free ride should continue.