As I explained earlier, Alliance des radios communautaires du Canada recently submitted a project to Canadian Heritage. The idea is to carry out a project that we have been very interested in for some time now, which is acquiring mobile applications for the four main mobile operating systems—Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and iOS. We would like listeners to be able to receive our programming not only through the FM band, but also using these new platforms.
We are being told more and more often that young people are deserting FM radio and that there are fewer and fewer of them listening to the radio. Most of the time, they have their iPods glued to their ears. I think there are probably some young people out there who probably don't even know what FM radio is. On the other hand, they do know what streaming is. They subscribe to those kinds of services in order to get music on line. We do not yet have a presence there, but it is not out of a lack of desire. It's a fairly ambitious project, but we still would eventually like to get there. That's why we are working towards it.
You also talked about social media. They do represent a challenge for us, in that it's a platform that is attracting more and more people. At the ARC, however, we are trying to work things so that these media are more like allies than enemies or competitors. For example, we are trying to convince our members of the need for them to be on Facebook and to use that platform for discussions which can subsequently be broadcast on our airwaves. We also use Twitter to relay bits of information that could prompt listeners to visit the station's website to get all the news.
The fact remains that radio stations with inadequate staff are having trouble fulfilling their role as broadcasters and at the same time putting content on social platforms.