Media Beat: October 31, 2018

By David Farrell

Shaw's Freedom Mobile offsets TV, Internet declines

Wireless growth buoyed Shaw Communication's top line, but Shaw lost 34,000 cable subscribers in Q4 and 1,700 internet subscribers in the same quarter, but gained 18,000 for the full year. – Emily Jackson, Financial Post

Dear Justin Trudeau: Canadian tech companies need your support, too

We have all seen the news of Toronto’s bid for the Amazon HQ2. Uber, Google, Salesforce and other giants have all been welcomed into Canada. We have seen our Prime Minister and government officials at all levels rolling out the red carpet to entice foreign companies to open up shop here to access our tech talent. They claim these companies will bring jobs. But the truth is that the revenue and economic impact of these companies does not come to Canada – it goes to where they’re headquartered. And as for the jobs being created, well, we are virtually at full employment in the tech space, so these companies are not creating jobs, they are just shifting engineers from Canadian companies to foreign companies, thereby reducing the creation of Canadian IP and economic growth.

What we need is a strategy to use our talent to create innovative Canadian products and to sell those products to the world, not sell out our talent to American branch plants who set up shop in Canada. – Carl Rodriquez, Globe and Mail ROB

Government banning demand settlements on copyright demands

The Canadian government has unveiled its long-awaited plan to fix abuses with copyright’s notice-and-notice system as part of Bill C-86, its Budget Implementation Act. Last spring, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains released an IP strategy that promised safeguards against intellectual property abuse, particularly use of copyright notices to send settlement demands to Internet users. The Canadian notice-and-notice system was formalized in 2012 to allow rights holders to forward allegations of online copyright infringement to internet users through their internet service provider. The system was viewed as a win-win approach since it promised to deter infringement through education rather than legal threats. Yet within hours of taking effect, anti-piracy companies began sending notices that included settlement demands backed by threats of litigation. – Michael Geist

Jj Johnston salutes Vanessa Thomas

Good Ones”. Today we are shining the light on Vanessa Thomas.
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The late and great Steve Young, 365’er Bob Saint and I were like the three amigos. They helped me from day one in the business and we became fast forever friends. We’d talk talent lots always looking to find the ‘next one’ out there, something that is still part of my coaching role. Steve talked a number of times about Vanessa Thomas who had reached out to him years before. She was a young woman in a male dominated industry, and Steve was a champion for women in the industry. They too became fast friends. Steve urged me to keep an eye on her and hire her. She was in the States at the time and loving it there, so I thought it would be hard to get her to come back home. By the time I got around to approaching her to work back in Canada, she had made some moves.

How did Vanessa get started and bitten by this bug she calls ‘music industry addiction?’

After undergrad at Concordia University, this Ottawa native headed to Long Beach, California to get her Master of Fine Arts in Acting at CSULB. Moving right up to L.A. after Grad school, she started doing voice over's for a then small radio syndication company, called Premiere Radio Networks, run by the best of the industry and still biggest mentors today, Tim Kelly, Ed Mann and Steve Lehman. They asked if she’d ever tried selling and she answered indignantly, ‘of course not, I’m an actress’. She goes on to say ‘little did I know that they are very closely tied’. Vanessa with her sunshine personality and smile from above became their top Syndication affiliate relations person, managed to find Sound Source (Gary Slaight, JM Hemirath and 365’er Lesley Soldat) and brought all their products to Canada. “I got to work with the best in Canadian radio as I sold the products into, Ross Winters, JJ Johnston, Brad Phillips, the late and great Rena Stuermann, Leslie Nelson, 365’ers Jeff Vidler and Sharon Taylor, and many more."

She says the single best training she ever received for the rest of her career, however, was working with the Acme Players every Friday and Saturday night doing Improv and Sketch Comedy. They started in the valley and then moved to La Brea in Hollywood. She was part of the original cast with Marc Drotman, Lisa Malone, Ralph Garman, Adam Carolla (who started giving them all free relationship advice after shows, which morphed into ‘Love Lines’ with Dr. Drew and then the ‘Man Show’ with Jimmy Kimmel) and the rest is history. – Continue reading Jj’s Facebook post here.