Friends of Broadcasting & Canadian content

Today, the Friends of Broadcasting released a study looking at Canadian’s perceptions of foreign ownership of broadcasting and telco companies. But is this kind of thinking becoming increasingly irrelevent? The foundation was built on the concept of “rare media”, you only had your local newspaper, radio and television station, if regulatory bodies controlled what they aired then you could regulate foreign and Canadian content. Foreign ownership of “rare media” was a threat in that economies of scale get applied and Canadian content is pushed aside.

Canadians are spending less time with regulated rare media and more time with whatever you want media. Some numbers I saw put online as 22% of a Canadians media day and increasing. Some studies put the 18 – 34 group Canadians spending more time with online than television or radio. So what about foreign ownership of online media sources? I categorized the top 50 sites (Cdn time spent) based on US ownership versus Canadian Ownership. Those top 50 sites represented over 50% of the time Canadians spent online while within just those top 50, the time spent on Canadian sites was barely over 3%. The question should not be “is this a threat to Canadian culture?” it should be assumed that it is and the focus shifted not to solving today’s issues of television, radio and newspaper foreign ownership but towards ensuring the Canadians are trained and enabled to create their own content, have access to the technology and master social networking distribution.

The above is 100% Canadian content distributed on a US owned broadcast hosting system sent to you by the ISP of your choice. Is that such a bad thing?