Raise the Hammer

That will naturally happen. A truckload of water will only ever fill so many glasses.

The Ceeb has a finite budget -- $1.8 billion, roughly two-thirds of which is government funding -- goes to funding content and delivering it via 30+ services in two languages, with a view to to reaching 34 million Canadians.

The vision study "Everyone, Every Way" neatly encapsulates this. Expanded regional service and addressing the gaps in Western markets will necessitate budget-minded business models.

It's not an easy task, and the results are often like watered-down oatmeal: inoffensively nutritious but thin and flavourless. The afternoon shift at Radio 2 is increasingly sounding like everything else on the dial, distinguishable mostly by its sexless chatter. Light classic rock, adult contemporary CanCon (lately, the commercial tic of rotation in daily samples of the same song from Leonard Cohen, Kathleen Edwards, Joel Plaskett, etc), hosts whose inflections are so similar that you wonder if cloned vocal chords are part of the economy measures. It's hard to imagine that this is the same CBC that dared to offer audiences Brave New Waves. (And even that era died when Brent Bambury left... the retirement of Peter Gzowski and Lister Sinclair in the following years only cinched it.) Digital arrives without baggage and can be its own thing, if we will only let it.

Forget the glass-half-empty grumping about deserving expanded service from digital for the foreseeable future -- simply being able to talk about "CBC Hamilton" as more than a hypothetical is already a service expansion.

Then again, a solution might reside in enlightened spending.

Holding onto programming like HNIC is an increasingly expensive endeavour, as sports rights tick upward faster than government spending. Letting that flagship go would free up money for underserved markets. You might be able to each "Everyone, Every Way" but you cannot also be everything to everybody.