Media Beat: August 13, 2020

By David Farrell

CRTC to spend $750M to connect 51 communities with broadband

Five northern community broadband projects in the N.W.T., Yukon and northern Manitoba will share in $72 million of Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) Broadband Fund money.

According to a press release from the CRTC Wednesday, the projects are designed to improve broadband internet service for about 10,100 households in 51 communities.

The CRTC will dedicate $750 million to projects that improve broadband services in rural and remote communities over the next five years. Many communities in the North rely on slower satellite data connections for internet service. – Anna Desmarais, CBC News

CTV snags TIFF Tribute Awards

Honourees include Sir Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, film director Chloé Zhao (Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider), and filmmaker Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake, Queen of Katwe and Salaam Bombay!). The one-hour tribute show will be broadcast Sept. 15 on CTV and its affiliated platforms and globally streamed by Variety.

More commuters now walk or bike to work than take public transit

Prior to the pandemic, 75% of workers commuted by private vehicle, 13% used public transit, 7% walked or cycled to work and about 1% used another mode of transportation. Fewer than 1 in 20 workers teleworked (4%).

Although private vehicles remain the most common mode of commuting since the onset of the pandemic, its share has declined from 75% to 67% in June. The decrease in the proportion of workers using public transit was even more pronounced, falling from 13% to 3% of workers—half the rate of those who walked or bicycled to work (6%). In June, 22% of Canadians were working from home and slightly less than 2% were using another mode of transportation.

One reason for the decline in private vehicle and public transit use may be attributable to the more than a five-fold increase (from 4% to 22%) in Canadians working from home since the onset of the pandemic. – StatsCan

RIP

Sumner (Murray Rothstein) Redstone, the hard-charging mogul who parlayed his father’s New England drive-in theatre business into a media empire that now flows into virtually every avenue of entertainment, has died. He was 97. 

Redstone was the controlling shareholder of the recently merged ViacomCBS — and previously CBS Corp. and Viacom — who made famous the mantra “content is king.”

Forbes estimated his net worth at US$3B in 2019.

– Pat O’Day (born Paul W. Berg in Norfolk, Nebraska) whose voice was well known for decades throughout Seattle as a disc jockey and an announcer at the Seafair races, has died at 85.

He passed away at his home in the San Juan Islands, his son Jeff O’Day wrote in a Facebook post.

At one time, Pat O’Day owned the afternoon airwaves, averaging 35% of the after-school and drive-time audience at a time when traffic was growing dramatically. The teenage car culture was in its heyday. Around the time the Lake City branch of the legendary Dick’s Drive-In opened in 1963, O’Day’s listenership peaked at 41%. And his company, Concerts West, was one of the major concert-booking agents in the nation.

According to Wikipedia, almost everything known (published) about Pat O'Day's work in the radio and live music concert businesses can be found in O'Day's autobiography, It Was All Just Rock-'n'-Roll II: A Return to the Center of the Radio & Concert Universe.

His story was featured in a 2015 documentary about radio DJs called I Am What I Play, directed by Roger King.