Before the holidays, an ITAC study reported that 95% of Canadians still turn to traditional media for their trusted general news reporting, despite two thirds of households having broadband internet connections.

More than 80% still rely of conventional media for breaking news.

The study found that only 11.5% believe that online media is unbiased, and 12% believe that online media is accurate. (The news release didn’t report on the trustworthiness of traditional media.)

We will be exploring new media content on a couple panels at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit: Consumers in a Multi-screen World and Content & Entertainment over Broadband.

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ITAC, Canadian Telecom Summit

How many people bought new HDTVs over the holidays and are now signing up for new packages from their cable companies and satellite service providers? Renting or buying new HDTV set top boxes, PVRs and signing up for enhanced programming packages?

A lot, I’ll bet, generating lots of new revenues for broadcast distributors.

Otherwise, there are a lot of distorted images coming across their screens – short, fat hockey players according to one of the TV commercials.

Many of those new TVs have sophisticated tuners, picture-in-picture and timing capabilities that go completely to waste because there is currently no standard way for manufacturers to build an integrated digital tuner for the cable industry.

Well, today, ahead of a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show, and ahead of FCC intervention, Comcast is announcing that there will be an industry standardization initiative, tru2way, to enable open development of new services and features that rely on two-way communication over the cable network.

Comcast plans to roll out the new platform to all of its markets later this year and Time Warner cable is said to be ahead of Comcast. Panasonic plans to announce a compatible Viera plasma HDTV set this year.

Is there any activity on this front in Canada? Is it even on the regulatory radar screen?

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cable, set top box

Call it one small step toward unifying broadcasting and telecommunications at the CRTC; the Commission plans to unify its numbering and nomenclature over the coming year, to take effect January 1, 2009.

In 2000 and 2001, the CRTC had an integrated numbering for Public Notices and Decisions. You can find an apologetic comment on its website for the irregular sequence of numbers if you look at some of the listings of PN’s from those dates.

This will be different, we are told, as part of an effort to provide greater consistency in the documents issued from both sides of the CRTC.

Perhaps a first step on the long road toward a unified Communications Act and Department of Communications?

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CRTC, broadcast, telecom

One of the very first blog posts I wrote, about 20 months ago, was about Toronto ICT plans. At the time, Toronto ranked third in North America, behind New York and San Francisco, as an ICT centre, and the city was trying to find ways to move up.

Now, I read in the Toronto Star that Toronto might actually prefer to to go to the dark ages.

The Star article says:

In a report that goes to city council’s planning and growth management committee next week, staff recommend new installations should undergo city review and be subject to public consultation in order to minimize the number of new towers in Toronto.

In April 2006, I wrote:

Want a good start to stimulate ICT? How about declaring the GTA to be a ‘telecom friendly free-trade zone’? If carriers want access to upgrade facilities, why not welcome them with the same gusto that Toronto has for the movie industry? It seems to me that movie production trucks are a bigger source of traffic tie-ups than fibre-optic construction, but no one (including me) would complain about them disrupting the movement of cars. Let’s be as positive about new telecom infrastructure.

You can’t be a world class ICT centre without world class telecommunications infrastructure. That means an objective should be to carpet the city with fibre optic filaments; welcoming investment to put five bars of coverage on every cell phone everywhere in the city. That should be the way the report should start.

Why wouldn’t the city report suggest working with carriers to find ways to share existing municipal physical plant? The idea could be to maximize opportunities for telecom investment – perhaps even generating revenue for the city.

None of us want unnecessary eyesores in neighbourhoods or introduce risks for kids. But does the city report look at sharing police or fire radio towers? What about municipal utility sites?

I’d like to see how the new city report gets reconciled with the one looking for improving ICT leadership.

University of Waterloo is establishing a dorm to be a place where some of its “most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.”

VeloCity is no ordinary student residence.

As the University Bulletin attributes to project leader Sean van Koughnett:

I thought about the many great success stories in the web, mobile communications and new media arena that originated in the minds of students, and I thought, this is absolutely the perfect time and place for something like VeloCity!

Waterloo has been talking to the major players and local companies in telecommunications, media and mobile communications and the MMNP project team expects to be making specific announcements shortly about corporate partnerships.

Applications for VeloCity will be taken later this month.