The 12th annual official kickoff of the Toronto International Film Festival — a.k.a. the Hollywood Suite TIFF Breakfast — saw another full house upstairs at the Omni King Eddie. Hollywood Suite president and co-founder David Kines welcomed the throng, pointing out that this is the first full-throttle post pandemic fest, judging by the number of
It’s one of the oldest business practices in the book: go global, sell local. Nobody knows this better than Amazon, and they’re applying it, big time, to their streaming service Prime Video. That was made abundantly clear Wednesday in Toronto at a press event, ably hosted by Citytv’s Liem Vu, and staged as “Prime Video
This has been a rough year for awards shows in terms of TV audience. How, then, did the 50th annual Juno Awards do on CBC a week ago Sunday? Not bad considering. The virtual, two-hour special – the first Junos broadcast since the beginning of the pandemic – pulled in a Live+6, 2+ average audience
World War Two historian and author David O’Keefe to pointed out an interesting irony the other day on Facebook. Tonight’s Juno Awards are airing on June 6 — the anniversary of the allies landing at Juno Beach as part of D-Day invasion. Now it is D-Day for Canada’s quarantined music industry given how many times
I was just a young punk photo editor at TV Guide when Kevin Sullivan’s Anne of Green Gables broke viewing records in Canada in 1985. A great, big, Hallmark greeting card of a series, the two-part event drew around five million viewers for one of its two nights. At least I think it did. That
Summer being a season of upside down schedules, it had been a while since I last spoke with CHML’s Scott Thompson. We got back together on the radio this week to talk about the big TV audience last Saturday night for The Tragically Hip. Which gave me an opportunity to take issue with the CBC’s
Overnight estimates for Saturday night’s nearly three hour live broadcast of The Tragically Hip’s end-of-tour performance in Kingston puts the average minute audience at 4,039,000. That’s an impressive number for a Saturday night in summer and should easily stand as the most-watched show of the week in Canada, outperforming CBC’s Olympic Games coverage. The Olympic
I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything that drew over 100 re-tweets before, but a rather simple observation is up around 155 “likes” Sunday morning (and incited about as many more unlikes from The Haters): Remarkable — any other broadcaster would have littered this showcase with promos and screen crawls #HipInKingston #CBCTheHip — Bill Brioux (@BillBriouxTV)