By David Farrell
Canada to apply USMCA cultural exemption to trade in digital media
The North American Free Trade Agreement was written before trade in digital media services even existed. The new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal attempts to define fair trade in the digital realm, but Canada wants to continue to give special treatment to its cultural industries. – Janyce McGregor, CBC News
Nearly half of all Canadian TV subscriptions are for streaming services
A new study expects OTT subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, CraveTV and Club illico will overtake cable subs in the next several years. – Sameer Chhabra, Mobile Syrup
Bell launches Canada's first cloud-based Virtual Network Services platform
Managing networks is becoming more complex as applications move to the cloud, employees become increasingly mobile and billions more Internet of Things (IoT) devices are launched. Businesses evolving their networks to take advantage of the scale and agility of the cloud are turning to virtual networks to help manage and orchestrate their network deployments.
Bell VNS is an end-to-end managed solution for enterprise customers across Canada. – Media release
CBC to air Murdoch Mysteries instead of municipal election
“In planning our election night coverage, we considered a variety of options to best address competing priorities, and we know through research that audiences want the results on mobile and digital,” said Thompson. “We’re confident that our coverage of the GTA municipal elections will provide extensive, up-to-date news across all of our platforms.” – Emily Mathieu, Toronto Star
630 CHED’s Bryan Hall celebrates 65 years of broadcasting: ‘It was a fluke!’
Known mostly as a sports guy, Hallsy got his start in news before hosting a Saturday jazz show called Music for Moderns. Ask him how he got his start in sports and he’ll tell you, “That was a fluke!” – Kirby Bourne, CHED
Netflix expected to spend $13B on original content this year
The Economist has projected on June 30 that Netflix will spend $12-13 billion on original programming this year. That’s much more than the $8B it planned to spend as of October 2017. It would also be vastly more than legacy studios are spending: HBO spent $2.5B on content in 2017, and even CBS spent just $4B. – David Z. Morris, Fortune
A search engine for radio and podcasts
Audioburst leverages AI and natural language processing to listen, understand, segment and index millions of minutes of daily talk content from thousands of top audio sources. – Michael d’Estries, From The Grapevine
