Why hasn’t this site been updated for so long?

As some of you may have noticed, this Web site hasn’t been updated since Christmas of 2012, and the live streams have been shut down last spring. The progress of the television channel has pretty much followed the same path.

The goal of launching a public access television channel has been put on hold until we can figure out what to do with it. The problem is that television is being abandoned by the general public at a steadily increasing rate. The term “Cord Cutter” is no longer just a concept; it has now become a growing phenomenon.

And it’s not difficult to understand why. Constantly increasing monthly cable rates and forced bundles of incompatible television channels have transformed cable television into a highly unattractive and extremely expensive product.

Cord cutting has not only become easier to accept. For the younger generation, it has already become a fact of life even when cable is still available in the household. The Internet has become the young generation’s “cable television.”

And this is the path The Canadian Public now needs to prioritize.

The option of this channel becoming a cable television broadcaster will still remain available since we’ve already proven during a three year experiment that it is possible to reliably live stream your own programming over various distribution methods including the Internet. This goal has been made even easier now that the CRTC has eliminated the need for a digital cable television channel to apply for a television license if they have less than 200,000 subscribers.

However, this approach still requires a lot of negotiations with the “gatekeepers,” namely the Canadian cable companies. This can become a tedious task, made even more tedious by the recent Bell/Astral merger. As a result of this merger, the larger Canadian cable companies now own most of the Canadian cable channels. It may now be close to impossible for an independent television channel to obtain carriage on any of Canada’s cable networks as these companies will prefer to carry their own channels instead of an independent channel.

Which is why The Canadian Public may need to concentrate its efforts on obtaining carriage over the Internet, both live streamed and deferred, a goal that is already achievable with the help of companies such as YouTube and Netflix.

Which happens to be where “the young people” are going these days.

Our activities won’t stop completely during this transition period. We’ll still occasionally present videos on our YouTube channel, a medium that has made it extremely easy to broadcast just about anything we wish, and monetize these broadcasts.

So the dream of launching a national public access television channel with an attitude is far from over. It’s simply trying to develop an even bigger attitude.

Thank you for following our progress over the years. We will be back with occasional updates.

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