WE HAVE SOME questions for everyone. Feel free to answer, if you like, at editorial@cartt.ca. Answers will remain confidential – unless you’d like us to make them public…
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1. Quick, what’s a two-syllable word, ending in “o” that is a low-cost Canadian wireless brand? With the launch of a new name, Koodo, on the Telus network, we now have three answers to that question – counting Bell’s Solo and Rogers’ Fido. Can someone in marketing can explain to me the reasons why cheap Canadian wireless brand names apparently must end in o? Why is that such a great hook?
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2. Please tell me, dear readers, if it should still be “news” that TV content is available across multiple platforms, or in high definition, or available on demand. I mean, by now, shouldn’t it be a normal business practice for new shows to be available on TV, on line, on VOD, and maybe on wireless? Isn’t shooting TV in high definition a regular thing now and not new news?
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3. During the hearings into the purchase of Bell Canada by the Teachers Pension Plan consortium, the enterprise value of Bell ExpressVu was said to be about $106 million. To any normal person, that sounds like a lotta dough for the 1.8 million-customer distribution platform. Except when one compares it to the approximately $750 million Bragg Communications paid for Persona Communications’ 250,000 or so customers in 2007. Are cable customers really worth about $3,000 a pop while DTH customers are worth a measly 58 bucks each? Can anyone explain this valuation difference to me? What am I missing?
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4. Shouldn’t the new owners of Bell Canada be re-thinking the deal not based on financial market conditions as has been covered ad nauseum, but on telecom market conditions? A Leger Marketing piece of research released to Canadian Press on Wednesday said that 44% of Quebecers now have a cable voice over IP (VOIP) telephone line. And the wireless world continues its focus on GSM while Bell is a CDMA company, meaning a tech upgrade looks like it may have to happen. Isn’t that scarier, overall, for Bell Canada than the credit market crisis?
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5. Is it a bit disingenuous of Canadian video distributors (both cable and satellite) – and me, for that matter – to say that Canadian consumers won’t put up with new fees for conventional television stations and may abandon the system, when they have, actually, put up with regular rate increases from almost all BDUs each of the past four to five years, with virtually no drop off in customer numbers?
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6. There is a ton of great Canadian television out there. Of that there can be no doubt. But I rarely choose to watch a television program because it’s Canadian. There are plenty of shows I like that happen to be Canadian, but I watch them because they are good TV, not because they’re made here. Am I alone in this sentiment?
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7. When is Apple’s iPhone going to launch in Canada? There was plenty of pre-Christmas speculation (some of it, er, wrong) and still nada. What’s the holdup?
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8. Will fee-for-carriage “bigfoot” the BDU and specialty hearings beginning April 8th? Will it be too dominant of an issue? There are so many items to be considered, was it fair for the CRTC to dump this gas on the fire so soon after saying there was no justification for such a fee less than a year ago when it issued its conventional television policy?
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Answers to these questions can be e-mailed to editorial@cartt.ca. We’ll keep ‘em confidential if you wish – and you can even pose some additional queries to us, if you like. We’ll do our best to answer them.
Questions, questions, questions…
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