The Canadian Public ®
Yes, The Canadian Public is moving from Montreal, Quebec to Ottawa, Ontario this summer!
On July 1st, the corporation’s current address and phone number will no longer be valid. We’ll publish the corporation’s new address and phone number shortly before the move.
The corporation’s Web sites and associated email addresses will remain the same.
Update: the move is complete. It’s nice to be back in Ottawa after 40 years. You’ll find the corporation’s new address in the Contact page.
On January 29, 2015, a decision was released by the CRTC in regards to signal substitution. Starting in 2017 (the NFL’s 2016-2017 season), the Super Bowl can no longer be signal substituted.
Additionally, the CRTC has limited the use of signal substitution only to broadcasters with an Over-The-Air (OTA) presence. Canadian channels available only on cable, IPTV or satellite services can not use signal substitution.
Furthermore, the CRTC has put broadcasters on notice in regards to signal substitution errors. On top of compensating BDU subscribers affected by signal substitution errors, action could be taken against the practice if too many complaints are received for a broadcaster and/or BDU’s sloppy application of signal substitution.
Broadcasters might even choose to drop unpredictable content such as live events and substitute the programming with Canadian content instead of running the risk of encountering too many signal substitution errors and possibly lose all of their signal substitution privileges as a result.
This decision on signal substitution may not be entirely what we wished for, but the fear of losing one’s signal substitution privileges could still result in a significant increase in the amount of Canadian content presented on Canadian television.
First, all of us at The Canadian Public would like to wish everyone plenty of health and prosperity in the new year!
Second, TCPub Media Inc. Will be moving from Montreal to Ottawa this summer! 2015 will be very busy for us!
This year’s Remembrance Day is significant in many ways.
To all the veterans, we salute you.
This is a short film about the problems with Canadian television, and how we can fix them. It was presented as an intervention at the CRTC’s “Let’s Talk TV” hearings on September 19th 2014 at Gatineau, Quebec.
The video received generous applause at its conclusion which, apparently, is an extremely rate event at a CRTC hearing.
A link to the CPAC video of the CRTC hearing will be provided once it’s available.
Our big thanks goes to all of the people who supported us in this project, and to the CRTC for allowing us to present our intervention in this unusual but highly effective format.
Written, produced, narrated and animated by François Caron.
Script editor: Jacinthe Caron.
Ending theme “Meaty Meaty Meat Pie” by Uncle Ghastly.
© Copyright 2014 TCPub Media Inc.
This channel may be technically in hiatus, but we’re still very busy in the background. As Monty Python would say: “We’re not dead!”
X-Mas?!?
Just kidding! It’s Christmas, everyone! Enjoy the full-featured version, and not the trial version!
All of us at The Canadian Public would like to wish everyone plenty of health and prosperity in the new year!
And that includes our veterans of the Korean war and the Afghanistan war.
Still hoping the federal government will do a proper job of supporting you brave guys and gals some day, instead of trying to weasel out of their commitments.
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.
Happy Holidays everyone!
All of us at The Canadian Public would like to wish everyone plenty of health and prosperity in the new year, now that we know the world HASN’T ended on December 21st!
To our friends, our comrades, and our heroes, we salute you and thank you as always for your generosity and your sacrifices.
Now if only the federal government showed the same level of respect instead of trying to “dispose” of all of you.
From the CBC’s Rick Mercer Report.