Speeches and Interviews

October 19, 1998

Television at Crossroads: How Can We Assure a Canadian Presence?

To the Young Entrepreneur's Organization, Manitoba Chapter — Perrin Beatty

The fine art of predicting the future

My starting point today is to tell you something about what my credentials aren't. I had an early experience in politics that taught me a lesson in humility 26 years ago, and it's been useful to me ever since.

It was the evening I won my party's nomination for the 1972 election. I was 22 at the time and had just defeated seven other candidates. It didn't take long for me to develop a politician's ego, and, as I drove to one of my organizers' homes for the celebration, I was feeling pretty proud of myself. When I arrived at his home, however, he greeted me by saying, "You know, that one fellow was just about the most impressive speaker I've ever heard. The way he spoke about unemployment and inflation was amazing. If he had won, he would have been the next MP, and, if the Party won the next election, he would have been in the Cabinet for sure. He might have been Prime Minister one day."

"If you really feel that way, why didn't you vote for him," I asked, chagrined.

"Because I didn't want to vote for someone who was smarter than I was," he replied.

So you know my credentials in talking to you today. I don't claim to be smarter than any of you about what the world is going to look like several years from now. What's more, I don't think either Bill Gates or Ted Turner or the host of gurus making a living from predicting our technological future can read the sands much better than we can. So a little humility on all of our parts might be a good thing.

Clearly, something is happening, something profound, even if we aren't sure where it is taking us. The boundaries between telecommunications, broadcasting and computers have all but dissolved. Distance itself is fading. Expectations of speed and accuracy in all things are accelerating. We may not know exactly where we are bound, but that doesn't mean we should simply sit back and let the future unfold as it may. Too much is at stake for all of us to simply be passive observers.

The Power to Transform

As Canadians, we have coped well with technological change in the past. The creation of the CBC itself was a response to a technological revolution in which we found ourselves flooded with American programming. Later, Canadian content legislation helped further repair the imbalance.

In my time in government, I formulated Beatty's First Rule of Regulated Industries: There is no-one more innovative than someone looking for a licence, and there's no-one more conservative than someone who already has one.

Certainly, that rule seems to apply to the broadcasting industry. Those people wanting in promise the moon while those who are already there talk about how the game is already getting much too crowded. They would far sooner divide up the winnings among a much smaller group of players.

That approach worked fairly effectively in the past, but it's not working anymore. The simple fact is that whether those of us in the industry want more competition or not is irrelevant. It is coming, and nothing we can do can prevent it. New specialty channels fragmented audiences last year and there are going to be even more channels this year. How many there will be next year, or five years from now, I don't know. All I'm sure of is that we will never again have fewer competitors than we have today. Like it or hate it, it's a fact of life, and strategies that are based on trying to recreate the Sixties are going to fail.

Broadcasting around the world is evolving into what we at the CBC refer to as constellations: an array of complementary services that allow a broadcaster to assemble financing, cover costs, and assemble audiences in new ways. Time Warner, Fox and Disney are developing such constellations, as are public broadcasters like the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Here in Winnipeg, Canwest is building an imaginative constellation extending across Canada and into international markets.

Instead of looking to governments to simply throw more tax dollars into the pot or squabbling over how to divide up a limited amount of money even more thinly, Canadian broadcasters need to use their resources far more effectively to build audiences for Canadian programming. And that means proposing new options for audiences instead of trying to block them.

If regulation of airwaves in the future is going to be very different from how it was done in the past, regulation of the digital bitstream is something else even more different. Make all the rules you want — the Internet just keeps right on flowing.

The world is awakening to this reality. In France, for instance, early efforts at some kind of national boycott of the Web have been abandoned. The French have struggled with a central question of public policy in a wired world and opted for the principle of participation. Publicly funded efforts are now underway to ensure that France is visible on the information highway.

Perhaps agreeing to make the best and most creative use of something we cannot control — a new medium which demonstrates how "knowledge streams across artificial frontiers like sunlight through glass," as Colin Browne of the BBC said last year, is the first and wisest of all public policies.

Clearly, restriction as a public policy is becoming ever more difficult. A court in Canada, for instance, may decide that the public interest is best served by placing a publicity ban on information presented in open session, but it means little if the proscribed information is freely available on American Internet sites, as it was in the Homolka case. Parliament may choose to legislate against hate literature or child pornography, but it cannot prevent the same material from being available on international databases that are only a telephone call away. The new technologies challenge national sovereignty itself.

What CBC is doing

Even in less authoritarian circumstances, the nature of the new media demands a different approach to policy just as it does to programming.

CBC's mission in new media is highly ambitious, but when you think of what's out there on the World Wide Web, and how little of it is Canadian, a strong Canadian CBC web presence is just as important as having a completely Canadian schedule on our main TV network. Who else is going to do it? Who else would you want to do it?

Our mission in new media, one I'm personally very proud of, is no less than to be the primary Canadian provider of distinctive, relevant content to new media users in Canada and around the world.

Before going on, let me assure you that we have no desire to see Canadian content on the web regulated into being. Or in imposing foreign content restrictions. We are not that naive! In fact, we have strongly recommended to government and the CRTC, that no regulation is going to be able to ensure Canadian content on the web. It simply won't work.

Anyone who reads Wired knows that regulation or interference is anathema to the very concept and philosophy that makes the web such a wonderful and liberating place. So, like the BBC and other public broadcasters, we are tending towards minimal regulation supplemented with incentives for national content and access. But we also know that there are things we can do on the net that no commercial provider is likely to do.

Hence our ambitious goal. And we are further along that road to reaching it than you may know.

Let's deal with providing unique Canadian material around the world first. Aside from CBC's short wave services, RCI, all of you know how impossible it is when we are away to find out what's going on at home. cbc.ca is filling that role.

I hope I don't have to argue further for the value of our web service as a way to get a Canadian news or information fix when and where you need it. The Newsworld site alone in September of this year had nearly 350,000 page views per week.

This is well and good. The CBC is Canada's largest newsgathering organization and it should be used to feed new audiences with differently formatted, more accessible versions of what we broadcast on radio and television.

But we've taken new media beyond that. We know that Canadian new media must fulfill its promise as something that is truly new, and not just a promotional or recycling vehicle for the old media, however good that might be.

CBC has two products unique to the Internet

First, and rather obvious, is a special kids' site. It was a natural given the fact that CBC has a proud history of quality production for kids — again nearly the only game in town in national broadcasting.

So, on Canada Day 1997, we launched CBC4Kids, a stand alone web site which provides unique and engaging multimedia adventures for kids on the medium they do seem to prefer. Popular features include "Sound Bar Jukebox", and "Kids Own Radio Dramas", which give children the opportunity to perform their own radio dramas. The site currently gets almost 50,000 page views per month and is growing. If you have children I urge you to take them to it.

This summer the site branched out and created its own CDROM game that can be sampled on the site. Called Sounds like Fun, it's one of the few such games that you can buy that is educational, entertaining, and yes, entirely Canadian.

The second uniquely web service is an arts and culture magazine called Infoculture — our French services pioneered a similar effort in December 1997.

Quite simply — English or French, the site is Canada's only major national vehicle for arts and culture information, reviews, event listings and feature stories. It's a place where Canadians can discuss our arts and cultural life, and serves as a gateway to all CBC and Radio-Canada cultural programming.

A national arts magazine with mass appeal is long overdue. Canada has some of the world's best artists, and a $16 billion-dollar-a-year cultural industry. But our ability to disseminate information about them and engage audiences has not kept up with our ability to create and express. We are determined that the Internet be a major player in Canadian cultural promotion.

To put it plainly, we want news about the Royal Winnipeg Ballet to be carried digitally from coast to coast and to the world. Both the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation see their sites as ways to promote better knowledge of their artists at home and abroad. We do too.

Finally, cbc.ca is not entirely without appropriate revenue generating potential. We partner with sponsors to create immensely popular special events sites for major events like the Olympics and the Federal Election. Such events draw all Canadians to the CBC and we know we can achieve extremely high use that interests sponsors.

It all sounds very promising, doesn't it? The good old CBC is not running to catch up to new media. We are in the vanguard of broadcasters around the world. Yes, we have to promote cbc.ca better. Yes, we have to integrate our TV and Radio news sites to provide one-stop surfing for news of Canada and its communities. We're working on that and will have an announcement soon.

We are also working on new alliances not only to ensure we have top-notch content, but also so that cbc.ca comes up on all the major portals and search engines. We need to push to make it easier for consumers to pull.

I believe Canada on the Internet must be cbc.ca.

It's interesting to me that the big question for most corporations developing sites is: how do you make money on the Internet? Yes, CBC wants to attract some revenue to help fund CBC's Internet activities. But unlike just about every other major player, we can run our site without the commercial imperatives that can so distort the web's real purpose and value.

Look at it this way. If you as an individual feel you have something unique to share with the world, you can quite cheaply open your own site and share it. You're not looking to be paid for it. That's what the web and the new media are really about. And that's the way we feel. CBC represents Canada in all our diversity, our plurality, and our tolerance and respect for justice and fairness. We want to share this freely with Canada and the world. It's as simple as that.

The new media are all about customer focus, and, as content providers, we have to change the way we package our products.

The power has moved from behind the screen to in front of it. We are being forced by demand to reach across the full spectrum of our services, and reconstruct bits of our programs to suit the individual interests of our users. Under the influence of a democratizing technology, the authority to dictate even what is relevant is no longer ours. However, if we build engines that package our programs in more personal ways, our reputation will grow, and our invitation to users to enjoy programming on our traditional media will have much greater effect.

We think of ourselves as a primary source of Canadian content. And the new media give us an opportunity to reinvent the way we brand what we do. As you may know, we have effectively Canadianized our prime time on both English and French TV. That for us was a first step of reinvention. We stood up for what we believe — that Canadian stories can be told and told well.

We recognize, however, that the first step may well have been the easiest. How we move from here is of critical importance and, as a public agency owned by and responsible to all Canadians, we rely on public policy initiatives for support.

New Media are Here to Stay

My personal opinion is that new media are in the public good, but the debate is wholly academic. After the first car accident, I'm sure there were plenty of arguments about the dangers of automotive technology. Especially if the folklore is true that the first two cars driven into the state of Texas suffered a head-on collision.

Discussion about the evil and mediocrity of the Internet are not, of course, irrelevant. They are, however, immaterial. The new technologies are coming at us like waves in a flood tide. Bigger. Faster. Further. We can't turn back those waves. We need instead to learn how to harness their energy to take us where we want to go.

At the CBC, our concern is what public broadcasters should do. What is our role in the digital millennium? The original purpose of public broadcasting was to promote cultural development and strengthen us in our roles as citizens. If this remains our goal, public policy must ensure
that it can still do so.

What public policy areas must be addressed

If regulation is problematic, what sorts of policies must we wrestle with? We need public policies that encourage the use of information technologies, not to restrict, but to ensure the free and open exploration of a universe of possibilities. And I believe, as do others, that the best public policies related to new media will put Canada in the position of a major content provider.

Think of the information highway itself. We've spent hundreds of millions building our end of it, but what traffic is driving down that highway? I can't tell you in detail, but I do know that most of the vehicles I see have American licence plates. So what can be done in the public interest to fuel the kind of programs that reflect our history, our values, our view of the world? What funds must be put in place to get Canadian programming rolling for the Internet, for digital radio, for HDTV and for other delivery systems and formats as they emerge? That, for us, is a central question of public policy.

Matters of copyright are another obvious issue. Who owns the intellectual property that moves around the world at light speed? When does the quotation of an entire essay, the borrowing of elements of a drawing, or the snipping and reuse of a tidy bit of web animation constitute stealing? When does such activity infringe on the rights of the creator, at least as Canadians understand those rights, and what instruments can be brought to bear once an infringement is admitted? And indeed, as the rate of information flow increases, and the dollar value of particular pieces of information drops accordingly, at what point does the cost of upholding copyright actually outweigh the benefit?

And what of the pillars of Canadian culture? What shape must an agency such as the CRTC take to have effective input in this new world? What new tools and instruments of government can help us put Canada in that beam of sunlight without tying the hands of those who wish to do so?

Then what of the way we adapt other existing services to the changes? Our telephone companies are highly regulated still. What happens to long-distance rates and rules when Internet phone makes talking with your sister in Tasmania a local call? On whom will the economic burden fall? — somebody's going to have to pay for it! These are huge discussions yet to take place, and they affect whole industries on which Canadians rely for services and for jobs.

Conclusion

These are a few critical areas for exploration, and there will be many more as the impact of new technologies drives the discussion further.

One conviction must be shared by all — that public policy has a role beyond seeing these innovations fulfill their technical potential: It must also address the fact that they exert a profound influence over the very identity of our society, in ways we are only just beginning to appreciate.

Confidently embracing new information technologies seems, at this point, by far like the best route to take. It will encourage Canada's creative industries to produce first-rate new media products. It will ensure that the creators of the new programming are protected. It will allow the recreation of Canadian institutions that can become effective agents of change. And it will help us shape a coordinated response throughout the industries that are most affected.

The benefits promise to be cultural as well as economic, and to realize those benefits, our debate over public policy must take into account the importance of rapid action. For Canada to be competitive in a market of truly global media, decisions to foster the growth of both information technology and Canadian cultural content must be made today.

We have seen that the information technologies dispersed throughout the world can be joined together. How they are joined remains to be determined by the people and institutions that care about the type of civilization we leave for future generations.