Hacker News Reader

Comment by parennoob | Hacker News Reader

"Young consumers, taking on their first apartments..., are ignoring the existence of $100+ premium cable bundles."

I live in a college town and can attest that a lot of the new graduates I know forgo cable subscriptions, either because they are broke, or because they can't be bothered to navigate Comcast's bewildering array of "packages".

"Have the intentions of mandatory CanCon TV spending drifted so far from the reality that the whole scheme should be scrapped?"

[edit] Canadian HN'ers, what are your impressions of CanCon? Is it like a Canadian version of the BBC, and if so, does it make shows with that quality? (The BBC makes a few really decent shows and some amount of debatable tripe.)

View on HN

CanCon stands for Canadian Content. High level, in order to maintain a broadcast licence in Canada, you need to have a certain percentage of your content be defined as "Canadian". The way you get a piece of content certified as Canadian is via point system - Canadian director, +1 point, Canadian lead actor, +1 point, etc... more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

One really odd thing about Canada is we don't "naturally" produce enough content for broadcasters to meet their Canadian content requirements (let alone content people actually want to consume), therefore there are HUGE subsidies in place for the production of Canadian content - like billions of dollars a year huge. These subsidies enable broadcasters to pick up Canadian shows cheaply in order to meet their quotas. Most Canadians don't realize how much money is given to media creators because the money is distributed in many different forms from different institutions, at both the provincial and federal level, i.e. those which invest in media (http://telefilm.ca/) distribute tax credits (i.e. http://www.omdc.on.ca/ ), and so fourth. This is ignoring the CBC by the way, the government financed broadcast organization.

The subsidies haven't followed changes in Canadian media consumption patterns though, meaning we over-subsidize mediums which are consumed less and under-subsidize those that are consumed more. It will be interesting to see if / how things change moving forward.

There's also the Canadian Media Fund. http://www.cmf-fmc.ca/ which supports not only film/tv production but also interactive digital media (ie. video games).

That's extremely interesting - thanks.

We do have a Canadian version of the BBC; it's called the CBC. I hear that their radio stations are pretty good, but their TV channel really makes me wish that we just spent our government dollars on making the BBC iPlayer available in Canada.

>Canadian content (abbreviated CanCon, cancon or can-con) refers to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) requirements, derived from the Broadcasting Act of Canada, that radio and television broadcasters (including cable and satellite specialty channels) must air a certain percentage of content that was at least partly written, produced, presented, or otherwise contributed to by persons from Canada. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

Ah ok, it's a quota requirement rather than a separate channel. Should have wikipedia'ed it before.

As others have said, CanCon is a quota for "Canadian" content on TV and the radio, which mostly means our radio stations play a lot more Nickelback than anyone wants to listen to.

While this may be true, I recently started volunteering at the student radio station at UBC, and I would be surprised if we have any Nickelback. Citr.ca also has a live stream, if you do not live in Vancouver.

For anyone wondering about some CanCon regulations as far as radio:

1. Music falling in Category 2 (Rock, Dance, pop, acoustic, country, easy listening) must consist of 35% CanCon

2. Category 3 (concert/classical, opera, musical theatre, folk, world beat and international, jazz and blues, religious, experimental) must consist of 12% CanCon

3. 7% CanCon during ethnic broadcast.

In order to qualify as CanCon, a song must contain someone of Canadian nationality in two of the for MAPL categories: music (composition), artist (music or lyrics performance), performance (live performance recorded or broadcasted from live in Canada), lyrics (written entirely by a Canadian).

CanCon is calculated on a weekly basis.

CanCon is generally pretty bad and shouldn't be compared to the BBC, though recently I've read some Canadian production companies have had a fair amount of success in selling their shows to US cable companies.

Someone from Quebec should chime in because from my understanding their locally made product is of higher quality than that of English Canada.

I would bet that the majority of young consumers that do have cable subscriptions do it solely for ESPN and the other sports channels.

Literally nobody I know has cable, just isn't worth it. Anything worth watching has a way to download it online easily and hassle free and if you don't feel like paying there's a million ways to download it regardless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com