TVOntario has struck its first deal with an online provider, and in a bid to reach more parents with its educational content, has partnered with Yahoo! Canada to make text and video from tvoparents.com available to the search engine’s 16.5 million monthly users.

CEO Lisa de Wilde says the educaster wanted to get its unique educational content in the hands of more people, more quickly.

‘We’re a small organization…so if we can partner with big players in the online space, we think we can get the kind of impact that our content deserves,’ de Wilde tells Playback Daily.

The details remain sketchy, however. No launch date has been set, as TVO and Yahoo are still ironing out ‘content integration issues,’ according to de Wilde. She expects programming to become available on Yahoo’s site in the next few weeks.

Content covered in the deal, unveiled Tuesday, includes articles, chat rooms, and video such as TVO’s Your Voice, an online program that pairs parents with experts on issues such as bullying and autism.

De Wilde says the caster will also look to expand its relationship with Yahoo in the future, by including content from its TVOKids site. De Wilde has, since joining the channel in 2005, been pushing it toward more digital and interactive production.

The news follows the release on Sunday of the CBC special Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister on BitTorrent — making the Ceeb one of the first major North American casters to use the file-sharing system to release primetime programming. The show, in which contestants compete in front of a panel of former PMs for the title and a $50,000 prize, aired Sunday.

But the net’s head of factual entertainment, Julie Bristow, says it was a one-time affair, and the pubcaster has no plans to make other programming available through BitTorrent.

‘It’s not a precedent that we’re setting…it’s really just specific to this show at the moment,’ she says. ‘We wanted to reach a mass audience…it’s all about participation and awareness.’

Participants were recruited through YouTube, and Bristow says since the show — which is aimed at a young adult audience — started out with a big digital outreach, the caster wanted to experiment with giving it back to the audience.

‘We certainly have a sense that there was good activity in terms of sharing, but it’s too early to track how it did,’ Bristow says.

In other online news, short-film channel Movieola has joined U.S. online video service hulu.com to make its films available to audiences south of the border.

The multi-year deal is in line with Movieola’s plans to expand into the U.S. market and boost exposure for Canadian films, such as At the Quinte Hotel, starring Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie, and comedies Nun Fight Club and Deathstar Repairman.