February 25, 2024
There’s been a burst of opinionating on the definition of “CanCon” programs. I thought I would get in on it. This week MediaPolicy posted Rule Canadiana: let’s experiment with the Canadian Content test. Carefully.
***
I am BritBox binging on movies staging Jane Austen novels. The plots invariably centre on the rotisserie of marriage courting. This is a handy segue to the spate of recent news in which Hollywood streamers search for partners, the most recent rumour concerning Viacom-owned Paramount and Comcast NBC Universal’s Peacock getting together.
Just before Christmas, the rumour was Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery (owners of HBO) hitching up. So Austen. If you know the books, at the end of every novel, everyone gets married. Sometimes for love and sometimes for money.
That’s the latest in entertainment streaming. Over in sports, last month we told you about the recently announced streaming joint venture between Fox Sports, Warner Bros Discovery’s TNT and Disney ESPN.
The strategy is to defend market share but also to recapture broadcast rights from digital-only upstarts DAZN and FuboTV. The New York-headquartered Fubo is best known in Canada for broadcasting English Premier League matches. Fubo is objecting to this marriage, challenging the Fox-WBD-Disney joint venture in the US on grounds of anti-trust.
***
Two recommendations for this weekend.
The first is to immediately buy Alexandra Posadzki’s Rogers v Rogers. I will spare you a plot summary, most readers already know it. It’s obviously about the family civil war for control of the telecommunications and media company and the dramatic Rogers-Shaw merger.
It’s page-turning storytelling full of some surprising and humanizing anecdotes and all of the industry backstories rendered decipherable for the lay person. Above all the book leaves you with deep thoughts about organizing economic activity in such a crucial industry. Four stars.
The other recommendation is a 50 minute Press Gazette podcast; an interview with media tech guru Ricky Sutton. The first half of the podcast is Sutton ripping the Big Tech platforms for backing away from a grand bargain to voluntarily provide billions in funding to news journalism; after the break he continues with a proposed solution, bringing together news organizations to license their content to Big Tech’s AI-LLM products.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or e-mail howard.law@bell.net to be added to the weekly update;
or follow @howardalaw on Twitter.
MediaPolicy.ca 