Shortwave radio is pretty much a dead medium thanks to the internet and satellite. The actual band is really still only of use in Africa and to reach populations in repressive countries like China, North Korea and Burma (shortwave radios aren't widespread in the middle east, it seems. Satellite is more effective there). But, of course, RCI isn't even on shortwave anymore.

The end of the Cold War, rise of the internet and the rise in globally available satellite channels, have all made shortwave radio irrelevant in the modern world - and I say that as someone who loves SW and spend many evenings glued to my shortwave radio in the 1980s. The irrelevance of shortwave is doubly so for shortwave stations that no longer even broadcast on shortwave.

Shortwave had two main functions. The first was to help keep expatriates and your nationals travelling abroad in touch with the home country. That reason no longer exists since expats can keep up on news from home by reading home newspapers online, listening to or watching home TV onlines or often by subscribing to a satellite package. No need at all to use a shortwave station to listen to the news from the old country. 

The second function was to try to influence or at least inform foreigners about your country and its views and, as a propaganda function, try to influence them (and in Canada's case, also to attract and inform potential immigrants about Canada). Well, that's long gone as well thanks to the internet. RCI's English and French service (which these days is a few webpages and podcasts) is completely redundant since non-Canadians who speak English or French can just access Canadian domestic media, if they're so inclined. The only argument in favour of keeping RCI is to have a means to communicate with non-English/French speakers, specifically Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic as those are the foreign languages RCI produces material in. That's why this move makes sense:

As part of the announced transformation, the English and French language services of RCI will be eliminated and will be replaced by curated content created by CBC and Radio-Canada respectively.

However, unlike the old days where a shortwave listener would scan the SW band and listen to whatever they happened upon, now you're competing with millions of other sites on the internet so I suspect the actual number of hits RCI gets is far fewer than the number of listeners they had in their heyday (and arguably, with Google Translate being at least partly competent, most non-English speakers could just as well look at the CBC News or Toronto Star website and get a functional machine translation. 

 

Last edited by Hansa (December 4, 2020 2:10 pm)

Hansa wrote:

I found this comment online. I don't know if the figures are accurate, but if they are, it makes RCI very hard to justify. 

The budget of 2.3million annually with around 1000 listeners a month. Works out to a cost of $191.66 per listener.

If that's accurate, and I suspect it is....shut. it. down. And I'm a proponent of well-funded public broadcasting.