It's been a rough week in Newfoundland with the crash of a Cougar Helicopters Sikorsky S-92 in the North Atlantic 67km from St. John's.  The helicopter was carrying oil rig workers to the Hibernia and White Rose offshore oil facilities 300km from St. John's on the Grand Banks.There was only one survivor out of the eighteen on board. Sixteen are still missing and one deceased has been recovered.

The SportPage, Newfoundland's local sports magazine and website has been expanding. It signed on early with NLPress.ca news agency last year and it began offering podcasts of local sports a few months ago. Now, it has launched a sports phone-in show ...live online.

Produced by Jim Mallay at Bioproductions, a video service company, and broadcast live from a suburban rec room in Mount Pearl, host Carl Lake and his guests talk sports and field calls. The next show is tonight, March 8 at 8:30PM (NST). NL PRESS is streaming the show on its site or you can find the direct stream here.

Now, webcasts are not new in Newfoundland. A number of years ago Sussex Place, Inc launched CFOG, an online broadcaster with audio and video pieces as well as providing webcast production to corporate clients. Alas, as with many things in an emerging technology, timing is everything and sometimes when you are ahead of the curve you have to wait for the rest to catch up. Then, net connections were finicky, bandwidth hellishly expensive and few consumer computers were capable of taking advantage of high-end multimedia streamed from the web.  Times change. It's just a matter of where you are on the timeline when they do.