The goal of these powerbrokers is either to preserve the regulatory status quo (by those who have built their empires within the haven of its 4 walls), or to broaden the regulatory umbrella (to allow more corporations to benefit from its warm, comfortable embrace).
Based on a mandate of protecting the Canadian citizen from the marauding rampages of global media conglomerates, the CRTC has nurtured the formation of our national media conglomerates. This costs the Canadian consumer through lack of choice, delayed access to innovation and technology, and the equivalent of an excise tax on every new feature that is introduced.
Canadians are over-taxed, and the CRTC is one of the more insidious culprits. Telcos and Cablecos are harvesting our money and borrowing more than their balance sheets to introduce technology at below cost to elicit the unlimited promise of Canadians paying whatever the CRTC legislates. And, in the process, they are doing a lousy job of providing service value to the Canadian customers that they control.
How does this affect me personally? Last May, I cut the cable. Literally. It was a painful choice for the family at first. Not to have news access through the remote, loss of Treehouse for the toddlers and the Cooking Channel to which we had thought ourselves addicted.
How did we substitute? Not through endless surfing on the Net to see what we were missing, as you might have thought. The radio alarm tells us at 7 am what we need to wear, and worry about. It takes 5 minutes and is a free service. We buy the music we like to hear when we are motivated to do so, borrow FREE movies from the library and purchase DVDs that we can play whenever we want. We have settled into a cozy environment where we also read books and engage with each other as a family.
Now, I may have clients starting to wonder how a marketing guy can function without being permanently attached to the media through the umbilical cable/cord, but I will defend this personal choice, although it may seem radical, and challenge to the Canadian media to say, “Grow up, play fair or I am not buying it.”
Canadian media and telecommunications is not my view of a customer-centric universe. So, excuse me. I am out of the Cable picture and I may even VoIP.
