Jesse Brown: Does CanCon have a digital future?
- December 10, 2008 1:08 PM |
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Canadian radio and television must contain a certain percentage of content made in Canada, by Canadians, and about Canadians. So sayeth the CRTC. But so far, the CRTC has kept its hands off of the Internet.
That may soon change.
This February, the CRTC is holding a public hearing on its New Media Exemption rule - a decision that dates back to 1999, when people still said "New Media".
They've asked for input from key players, and around 150 various stakeholders have chimed in.
Among them is Google, which is encouraging the CRTC to leave well enough alone. To quote its brief,
"the New Media Exemption is the best regulatory approach to keeping the Internet awesome."What a Googly thing to say!
Google goes on to argue that CanCon is doing just fine on the Internet without the CRTC's help, thanks very much. By including User Generated (Canadian) Content in its calculations, it figures that:
"even if ...CBC, CTV and Canwest Global increased their Canadian content to 24 hours per day, YouTube would still have more Canadian content than those three television networks combined."
So what'll it be, CRTC - a thousand adorable puppies or Peter Mansbridge?
Or, to ask the CRTC a couple more practical questions:
- How could you regulate CanCon on the Internet anyway, even if you wanted to?
- If everyone ends up getting their TV and radio through the Internet, will CanCon rules even matter?
About the Authors
- Tara Kimura
is a multimedia producer for CBCNews.ca.
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Comments (5)
Seeing as I'm one of millions of those CanCon generators, I have to admit that I'm not too worried about CanCon over the Net. We're doing fine, and we're building lots of stuff worth reading and watching here.
The concept of CanCon and the 'Juneaufication' of the Canadian media was as repulsive to me as the politically correct state approved 'art' of the era of Stalin & Mao ... I am an old broadcaster who has worked in the media for five decades and who sees such moves as just another variance on "Nationalistic Jingoism" that has no viable place in an increasingly Global village ... I have been overjoyed with the advent of the 'Net' and the freeing up of access to information and entertainment that is not 'State Approved/Regulated'.
The CRTC has a place in Canadian society as a regulatory body but its powers should be kept in check and applied only in the logically defined areas of the public good.
Holy crap. The CRTC is too active as it is. Keep it the f*** away from the internet.
Mind you, there's a place for the CRTC in the regulatory framework in the nation. TV, radio...those could use a little whip-cracking to break up the private monopolies, er, monotonies.
I worked in radio for many years, mostly in Canada, but also in the Caribbean for a year. As a DJ and programme director, I dealt with "CanCon" daily. Some radio formats were easy to find good CanCon for, while others were much harder.
In both cases, especially the latter, that meant that once a record was "in", i.e. selected by the PD and music director as fitting the format, then it was guaranteed lots of airplay. Songs that didn't get in, never got in. The tried-and-true old faithfuls could always get in, while new artists found it much harder, sometimes impossible to get in.
Many PDs and MDs would wait to see if other stations added a new song by a new CanCon artist. Unless someone took a chance, then no one would and it could have been a great song. As one PD said to me many times, Anne Murray and Gordon Lightfoot could mumble, stumble, belch, and fart for three or four minutes and get it accepted by stations to use in their CanCon library, but if the best musicians and singers in the world made the greatest record ever and released it under an unknown name as a CanCon "MAPL" song, few if any Canadian stations would risk adding it.
That ensured that stations would play the same old stuff by the same old artists. They also treated the CanCon minimums as maximums. We *had* to play 30% CanCon, but we *only* had to play 30% and if we let it get above that, we were told, usually quite firmly, to get it back down to that level.
The 30% quota is the average for 6 am to midnight over a full week, so time periods like Sundays from 6 to 8 am and 10 pm to midnight are packed with CanCon so they won't have to play as much in other hours.