Yesterday, Michael Sabia signalled the end of Bell Canada’s Jean Monty convergence strategy. Monty’s approach was a natural extension of A. J. de Grandpre’s initial diversification of the phone company, that created BCE and took Bell into such ventures as real estate and pipelines. In announcing its contraction into the income trust, with its renewed focus on core telecommunications, Michael Sabia was quoted as saying:

The elimination of BCE is a further step in our plan to focus on Bell and our communications operations. That is the business we know. That is the business we will stick to.

On the other hand, GE and NBC seem to be taking integration to a new level. I tuned into 30Rock, NBC’s latest insider view of TV and saw how the GE / NBC / Universal empire plans to monetize their assets in the emerging video-on-demand and download era.

Alec Baldwin, in the role of Jack Donaghy, claims to have been promoted to his position of network executive because he introduced the GE Trivection oven: “Trivection technology achieves the delicate balance of heat and time by combining thermal, convection and microwave heating methods”. Jack claims “it can cook a turkey in 22 minutes” although the GE website only claims a 22 pound turkey can be cooked in 2 hours.

It is product placement to the extreme. I felt like I was watching weekend cartoons – 30 minute commercials for the action figures, and then realized the advertiser (GE) owns the network (NBC) and created a show about a fictional NBC TV show, but having the script prominently feature an oven made by GE.

NBC offers many of their new shows by download, including complete episodes of some. The 30Rock download opens with a commercial for ‘Man of the Year’, a Robin Williams film released by Universal – of course, another part of the empire.

I have been writing about disruptive TV bypassing broadcast networks. Content developers are finding ways to reach the new markets.

Jean Monty looked into the future and saw convergence. GE/NBC is demonstrating convergence to the max.

As was anticipated by some, Bell Canada has followed TELUS in turning the entire company into an income trust, winding down BCE and simplifying its corporate structure.

The BCE holding company was originally created as a way to work around CRTC rate regulation, moving unregulated operations out of the telco and into separate structures.

Now, to increase the dividend payouts (almost doubling from $1.32 to $2.55) and thereby juice the stock price, BCE is being unwound, following TELUS’ lead from exactly a month ago.

Two questions: what does all this mean for customers; and is there still a good reason to maintain the financial and operational complexities in Bell Aliant?

There is an auction for mobile wireless spectrum coming up and a consultation paper can be expected from Industry Canada some time before the end of the year.

Expect five issues to be canvassed:

• Should there be a set-aside for new entrants?
• Should a spectrum cap apply?
• Should there be mandated roaming for new entrants to be able to leverage existing networks?
• Should there be mandated tower sharing?
• Should the auction include national / regional / local spectrum?

A set-aside would presume that Industry Canada does not believe that the current industry structure, with 3 facilities based wireless service providers, is sufficiently competitive. It would be interesting to understand how the spectrum branch could reach that kind of conclusion, when the Competition Bureau did not intervene in the Rogers acquisition of Microcell.

That said, we have been somewhat vocal about consumer pricing for mobile wireless, with LD rates and so-called system access fees.

We’ll be covering the consultation more over the coming months.

Light Reading writes about a report from Sanford Bernstein that quashes the view that cable TV companies will be running out of capacity, even when faced with Verizon’s FiOS project.

As I mentioned on Friday, “Indexing and searching video is an interesting problem. User created video content is a start.” Will telcos leverage Google – YouTube technology users as a disruptive approach to video, perhaps based upon video-on-demand?