Overall, I'm not a big fan of taking advantage of "the current thing" for any intent or purpose, let alone for commercial purposes, but I like this ad. From what I can tell, the effort and resulting production value are unusually good, especially by today's standards. It has a great concept, camera work, action sequences and music! Unfortunately, the song (The Spirit of the Radio by Rush) doesn't reflect the reality of much of the music that comprises the brick & mortar shopping experience in real life.

Although on an unrelated note, on one occasion, I was on a late night bike ride one summer night and stopped in to a Rabba on Confederation Parkway in downtown Mississauga for some drinks and much to my delight, they had Q107 on their sound system.

It really was originally intended to be a temporary exhibit for the 1889 exposition. It was a crucial testing ground for both experimental radio and TV broadcasts. Before the 1910s-1920s, it was thought by many, including public officials to be essentially useless, and its relevance as a tourist attraction was largely unknown, despite its origins as a centerpiece for the exposition.

It was also disliked by a lot of local artists and residents and, perhaps unsurprisingly, considered unsafe by a lot of people, including some who were familiar with structural engineering. Many residents were simply opposed to its height and design relative to the low-rise urban cityscape of the city and the resulting aesthetic impacts. This may have been an early example of NIMBYism on the basis of "context" and/or "character" commonly used to oppose re-development of existing populated areas in North America today.

It was well ahead of public mindset in terms of height, structural design and its use of electrically powered elevators, often referred to as "lifts" in Europe.

Dale Patterson wrote:

"Mayday", now in its 22nd season, should be on the list. And how did "Corner Gas" not make the list? For shame!

I was going to mention Trailer Park Boys, but Mayday, known as Air Crash Investigation in the U.S is another homegrown series that is well regarded internationally and both are favorites of mine. Corner Gas is another obvious example. They should have just expanded the list beyond 20 if they had to IMHO.

As someone who personally enjoys numerous programs produced by PBS network stations as well as national network ones such as Nova, I seriously hope this trade relations disaster doesn't inflict them any significant consequences.

Besides my personal concerns with fad-exploiting people just taking advantage of Canadian patriotism and "buying Canadian" as "the current thing", there's also the issue of possible collateral damage inflicted against entities that are not at all involved in the politics behind the initial tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, and they could be commercial, non-commercial in the case of local PBS and NPR network stations and possibly even charitable.

These are very unfortunate things to think about. Staying more strictly within the topic of broadcasting, particularly at the local level, WNED provides those who are able to pick up its over-the-air signal with a total of three channels multiplexed on to its single transmitter. There's the main PBS network station WNED itself on 17.1, Create; a 24/7 arts & crafts channel on 17.2, and PBS Kids; a 24/7 young children's channel on 17.3. Many other PBS stations have a similar arrangement. There's also a full simulcast of WNED 94.5 FM as an audio-only channel that for some reason is mapped as 31.10. WNED provides all of that with a much smaller proportion of public (taxpayer) funding than CBC, CBC Radio-Canada (French), TVO, or any of the other provincial public service networks.

Each of our public broadcasters provide only a single program service or "channel" and over-the-air coverage is much more limited than those of many PBS network stations boasting decent networks of re-transmitters. Thus, PBS is entirely morally worthy of continued viewer donations and I would support the sponsors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and local PBS stations. I hope others agree.

Chrisphen wrote:

Sad news. She was beloved by a generation for her work.

She truly was and is. I never saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer and in all honesty, I watch significantly less TV and fewer movies than the average person, but Harriet the Spy has really hit home with me with its message in my adult years.

Michelle Trachtenberg; who played the lead protagonist Harriet M Welsh in Harriet the Spy has died at the age of only 39. Harriet the Spy is one of my favorite movies and has a strong social message to offer anyone who watches it regarding having basic respect for others, particularly your friends and what you could have to lose if you don't. It's mainly geared towards children, but it's very much relevant and relatable to all age groups. She also played Dawn Summers; the sister of Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Police do not currently suspect fowl play and it's been reported that she recently underwent a liver transplant.

The movie, although set in New York City was mainly shot in Toronto and there are numerous visual indications of this throughout. In 2016, an article detailing the known Toronto filming locations of the movie was posted by Torontoist; a now-defunct online publication that was acquired by another publication; The Daily Hive years ago. Their entire old site including the article has since been purged, but remains accessible through the Internet Archive. It seems that even in 1995, when the movie was shot, Toronto was a decent and presumably more budget friendly substitute for New York City, and the period architecture was and is key to this, although urban areas of Montreal seem to have been developed in a manner more characteristic of the outer boroughs of New York City than Toronto.

I couldn't get the mask for the link to the Internet Archive to come through, so I'll just paste it raw here. https://web.archive.org/web/20170309050647/http://torontoist.com/2016/05/reel-toronto-harriet-the-spy/

I certainly am not taking the idea of annexation by the U.S seriously, and I don't feel that it should happen. Our country is in need of repair and restoration, not decommissioning. We functioned well as a sovereign nation and good neighbor of the U.S for 150 years and are entirely capable of doing so again. This topic and the scenario that inspires it is pretty much fantasy. I really hope my imagination here hasn't caused too much drama.

My idea here is to discuss in the most neutral manner possible what a hypothetical merger into the United States would look like for our media and telecommunications industries in general. I'm aware that the U.S has long had very different regulations governing traditional broadcasting, relatively little governing what are known in Canada as BDUs (Broadcast Distribution Undertakings) and almost none governing anything not available over-the-air.

If the almost-impossible were to happen, I would assume Canada would inherit all of the American regulations from top to bottom, some of which would be for the better and others potentially for the worse. I imagine the CRTC would effectively cease to exist. It could be absorbed into the United States' Federal Communications Commission or shut down altogether depending on how much or how little the FCC would need to expand its operations to cover our domestic infrastructure that their laws would require them to regulate.

I think the effects of absorption would be too vast for me to cover here myself, but one interesting subject is terrestrial radio stations. Broadcast callsigns for standalone radio and TV stations in the US, as a general rule with some exceptions, use the W prefix east of the Mississippi River and the K prefix west of it. If there's no legal mechanism by which the Canadian Cx prefixes could be added to the U.S's internationally regulated allotments, this would lead to a chaotic situation whereby stations in the eastern portion of our country would have to re-assigned new callsigns with the W prefix. Presumably, the K prefix would be assigned in each of the provinces and arctic territories west of Ontario, if logic and tradition were to be adhered to. Alternatively, the two prefixes could be used interchangeably, especially if Canada were to become a single 51st state with no remaining internal geopolitical separations.

I also wonder about what the leg

I might be over-explaining things here, but here I go. The story of Queen West is similar to other urban areas in the world today, including some others in Toronto. Excessive gentrification increased real estate costs to levels untenable by many more blue-collar businesses and residents and sadly live music has suffered among the worst losses even before 2020 despite it literally being a near billion-dollar industry just in Toronto itself as of 2019.

Other urban areas such as Liberty Village, the "main drag" of Yonge Street, the re-developed Regent Park and the eastern waterfront becoming desirable residential neighborhoods for the demographics that Queen West has traditionally catered to might also be another factor, although they too are affected by higher real estate costs. Simply put, although the "cheap rent" that put the area and its counterparts in other cities on that cultural map no longer exists in Toronto or many other cities, there are also a lot more choices of cool trendy places for those interested in good urban living today than in the 1970s and '80s.

The suburbs are also urbanizing to some extent. In exchange for coping with what is currently a more car-centric landscape, more rudimentary public transportation and slimmer offerings of "stuff to do" without making the trek to urban Toronto, an artist or professional of any age might find slightly cheaper rent or real estate prices in, for one good example, Mississauga City Centre; a rapidly emerging and urbanizing "downtown-to-be" with a new light rail line opening soon that will have a dedicated loop running right through it, drastically improving connectivity to local GO Transit stations and will create strong incentives for urban re-development up and down Hurontario Street.

The media landscape is another obvious factor. Traditional media is plagued with aggressive cost-cutting, and the latest manifestation of this has been the transfer of Bell Media's Toronto operations from the legendary and

Even in spite of the listenership figures cited in that article, it baffles me as to why the authorities in those countries have gone to and are going to the efforts to actually legally phase-out analog FM broadcasts when there doesn't seem to be any prospects of auctioning off any of the 88-108 MHz band. With no financial incentives, why bother eliminating a fairly robust legacy analog technology, potentially disenfranchising smaller community broadcasters of more modest financial means in the process? As for the climate goals claimed, I'm a lot more worried about E-waste and the seemingly universally shorter lifespans and more difficult repairability of modern DAB+ radios and equipped stereo receivers. More aggressive greening of their electric power generation and transmission infrastructure and replacements of older transmitters with new models would probably be a better move.

I read in pretty good detail about DAB in Canada about nine or ten years ago. The story is similarly as fascinating as it is disappointing. Supposedly, the US actually conducted successful experimental broadcasts in the 1.45 to 1.49 GHz "L Band" in San Francisco in 1996, but the Department of Defense refused to relinquish any of the 1.45 to 1.49 GHz band that was to be used and was used in Canada for the duration of the fruitless saga. This effectively prevented the system from being adopted in the US in any capacity, which prevented the development of a sufficient supply chain of radios. This also ultimately led to the development and widespread implementation of what's known as HD Radio, which uses in-band, on-channel sideband technology that requires no new dedicated spectrum. As DAB+ was being rolled out in Europe, the operational DAB multiplexes in Canada were decommissioned, and the whole thing went less-than-nowhere, its very existence almost completely unknown to the listening public. The posts by "tvguy" and "Evuguy" are eye-opening.

RadioActive wrote:

I can't speak to the architecture and it's been a very long time since I was at #1 Yonge St., but back in the late 70s, I worked at CKEY, which occupied the top floor of the Star Building. 

All I can say is the view from the newsroom 25 floors up was absolutely stunning. You could see much of the city from the wrap-around area and it was magnificent. In fact, we were one of the first to realize something bad was going on during the now infamous Mississauga train derailment emergency, because we could see the flames from that floor. Of course, at the exact moment, we didn't know what caused it. 

And it's for that reason of nostalgia for my very first paying job in radio, if nothing else, that a part of me is sad to see it go. 

I completely understand. I remember you posted a while ago about seeing the fire from the Mississauga train derailment from up there. That must have been surreal once you learned of the magnitude of the situation. Apparently, it triggered the largest peacetime evacuation in North American history prior to Hurricane Katrina, in a city of about 200,000 people at the time compared to 700,000 to 800,000 today. I figured that the building, especially from the top floor must've had a great view especially back then. The waterfront was mostly undeveloped with the exception of a few early high-rises such as the Westin Harbor Castle. I always enjoy seeing these old promos. Every time an old place is lost, it takes embodied memories with it, just like the old Regent Park and the clock tower at Erin Mills Town Centre. Maybe I was a little insensitive in my reply there. I really wouldn't mind seeing the existing structure re-purposed, re-clad and incorporated in to the new community. It could be done, but the developers obviously feel that a total replacement of the structure is more financially appropriate.

Evuguy wrote:

Interesting though that when you look at the Buffalo market, Urban WBLK and Classic 97 Rock are at the top of the ratings. Urban doesn't even show up in that national list.
 
Regarding religious broadcasting moving towards the top of popular American radio formats, I'm not too surprised either.  The EMF has been buying up distressed radio properties, such as the former WTSS 102.5 from the troubled Audacy group.  One of EMF's main reasons was the quality signal the station puts into Ontario.  Crawford Broadcasting's religious WDCX (99.5 FM / 970 & 990 AM Buffalo/Rochester) doesn't have a good signal into the GTA, yet it solicits a lot of its advertising revenue from businesses in that area.  It goes to prove that you don't need a blowtorch of a signal to bring in an audience if you are providing what (the remaining) people listening to radio are looking for. 
 
If I had a crystal ball, I would predict that CFNY 102.1 will soon be acquired by a religious broadcaster.  As we know, it's parent company is in financial distress.  Aside from 102.1 giving a superior quality signal to the GTA, it would help repatriate advertising dollars that are now going south of the border and I think we all know how the CRTC feels about that.  Some detractors for CFNY are that its current alternative rock format is targeting a younger demographic that likes to stream music.  Also, CFNY's format is not unique to the market as it competes with Indie 88.  Even CFNY's sister station, Q107 is now taking on some of its playlist.  Another interesting fact is that the Canadian arm of religious broadcaster UCB keeps delaying the launch of its Scarborough LPFM operation.  UCB own a network of FM stations, including nearby markets Peterborough, Belleville and Cobourg and have been granted an extension to Oct 2025 to get Scarborough on air.  The Scarborough signal will only cover a small portion of Toronto due to its low power and antenna height, plus there is co-channel

…