canada – Page 2 – Daleisphere

June 4, 2008February 28, 2017

iTunes Movie Rentals Come to Canada

iTunes Canada Starting today (press release), Apple Canada is making movie (and some TV show) downloads available to Canadians through the Canadian iTunes store. Apple says 1200 titles are available at launch, including 200 ‘high-def’ titles.

Despite Canadian dollar parity, as usual Canadians will pay more per rental ($4.99 for new releases, $3.99 for older titles) than our American friends who pay $3.99 and $2.99 respectively. In both countries ‘high-def’* versions cost $1.00 more when available.

Canadians will have 48 hours to view iTunes movies after pressing play. This is surprising because Americans have only 24 hours to finish watching iTunes movies. I expect the U.S. service to follow suit shortly. As in America, Canadians have 30 days after downloading to start watching their rented movie before it is deleted.

I took a quick look at the iTunes Canada movie offerings. There seems to be a good selection of new and older movies. Unlike in the U.S., there are no current prime-time T.V. shows available for download through the service. The available TV shows are either shows you never heard of or older TV shows. I expect that to change over time too. Participating studios include Disney, Paramount , Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, Universal, MGM, Sony, Lionsgate and Maple Pictures.

Below I discuss your iTunes movie play-back options and compare the iTunes movie service to Bell’s recently announced video download store, the Xbox 360 movie download service, the Amazon Unbox-to-TiVo video download service and the pending PS3 movie download service.

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June 1, 2008February 28, 2017

French Open 2008 First Week

There’s not much to love about this year’s French Open – so far. There wasn’t one memorable match in the first week.

Two of my favourites, Davenport (not playing for ‘personal reasons’) and Roddick (out for a rotator cuff injury) are not participating. Three time French Open champion Gustavo Kuerten, one of my all-time favourites, formally retired from professional tennis this week after an early round loss (I’ll miss Guga). Clijsters’, Henin’s, & Agassi’s retirements have left big holes in the sport. Hingis was forced out of professional tennis due to a cocaine scandal. Baghdatis, Fish, Mauresmo, Safin, Blake, and V. Williams’ were all early round losers. Significant rain delays resulted in the poor already Super Signal coverage (see below) being even worse than usual.

On a happier note, it was a pleasure to see Hewitt go down to Ferrer and Serena Williams go down (once again with little grace or class) to Srebotnik. I was a Hewitt fan in his earlier years. But his success made him too cocky and arrogant for my tastes. Serena’s always been in my bad books with rarely a kind word for anyone.

Perhaps I was spoiled with the terrific first week of tennis at the 2008 Aussie Open. The early round Roddick-Kohlschreiber and Federer–Tipsarevic matches there were probably some of the best matches I have seen in years.

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May 25, 2008February 28, 2017

Ouch! I Cut Myself Wokking

While chopping cauliflower in preparation for my nightly wokking, on Thursday, May 15, I broke a cardinal cooking rule that my mother taught me: "never cut towards yourself".

Shortly thereafter I found myself in the emergency room at Toronto’s Saint Michael’s teaching hospital getting nine stitches. I felt as though I was a patient on the television show ER. The med student that stitched me up did a terrific job with absolutely no pain. My thanks go out to the med student and the supervising doctor for a terrific job.

The injury has resulted in almost constant sharp pain, has inhibited my ability to use my computer for work or play and prevented me from: 1) completing the GTA IV campaign; 2) continuing my GTA IV diary entries; and 3) blogging as much as I would have liked to. Indeed, it’s astonishing how much I cannot do while attempting to safeguard my left hand as my finger heals.

On the upside, the injury has resulted in my having a practical need to test and use, on a sustained basis, the Windows Speech Recognition software built into Vista. In fact, I have written this blog post almost entirely through voice dictation. I’m keeping notes and expect to write a future post on my Vista voice recognition experiences. [June 3, 2009 Update: I never did write that post as typing / and controlling Windows by voice is still not practical for the able bodied typist]

I can’t feel anything above the cut to the tip of my finger on the inside. But both the emergency room doctor and my family doctor believe that the nerves will reconnect themselves within about two months giving me full feeling back.

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May 23, 2008February 28, 2017

Net Neutrality Rally on Canada’s Parliament Hill – May 27, 2008

On Tuesday May 27, 2008 between 11:30 am and 1:30 pm, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa, and other prominent supporters such as Michael Geist, will be sponsoring a Net Neutrality Rally on Canada’s Parliament Hill.

The net neutrality rally is intended to foster greater Internet competition, innovation and consumer rights:

1. Competition:

To stop vertical market leveraging at the expense of new entrants
To prevent incumbent cable/telco duopoly control of the Internet

(see, for example Geist’s Bell’s Throttling Plan a Threat to a Competitive Net)

2. Innovation:

To promote an environment conducive to the development of new and innovative content and web services by Canadian entrepreneurs

3. Consumer Rights:

to promote ISP transparency
to promote consumer privacy
to demand that ISPs provide the advertised Internet quality of service that consumers pay for

If you live or work in the Ottawa/Hull area, please consider participating.

Here’s Amber MacArthur’s April 2, 2008 “Net Neutrality in Canada” Video Update:

Below is the complete exchange (partially included in Amber’s piece above) on ‘net neutrality between MP Charlie Angus and Canada’s Minister of Industry Jim Prentice during Parliament’s Question Period on April 2, 2008. The conservative government has chosen to punt the issue despite significant known net throttling, deep packet inspection, traffic shaping and seemingly arbitrary bandwidth/usage capping by Canadian ISPs.

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April 24, 2008February 28, 2017

Global Begins HD Broadcasting in Canada

Global HD

Canada’s national television network, Global, is now broadcasting in HD in the Metropolitan Toronto and Golden Horseshoe areas of Ontario on their Hamilton (CHCH) and Toronto (CIII) affiliates. Global is Canada’s last major nationwide network to start broadcasting in HD. It was facing a June 2008 hard deadline imposed by the CRTC to begin broadcasting. It had missed previous CRTC-imposed deadlines.

Global (CHCH on 11-1 and CIII on 41-1) follows CTV (CFTO on 9-1), CBC (CBLT on 5-1), CityTV (on 57-1), SunTV (on 66-1), Omni1 (CFMT), Omni2 (CJMT) and CRC (CBC French) all of which had been broadcasting in HD for some time. TV Ontario is not yet broadcasting in HD.

Depending on their southern exposure, Torontonians can also expect to receive ABC (WKBW on 7-1), CBS (WIVB on 4-1), NBC (WGRZ on 2-1), Fox (WUTV on 29-1), PBS (WNED on 43-1), Think Bright (on 43-3), CW (WNLO on 23-1), RTN (retro TV on 7-2) and other U.S. networks broadcasting in HD from up-state New York.

All these channels are available free to anyone in Metro Toronto that has an inexpensive UHF antenna and an HDTV or other settop box with an ATSC tuner (a.k.a. HDTV tuner). Many HDTVs have ATSC tuners built in as do TiVo HD and TiVo Series 3 units.

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April 3, 2008February 28, 2017

CRTC Rejects Independent HD Broadcaster

Text of Decision

In yet another example of Canada’s broken broadcasting policy, Canada’s national broadcasting regulator, the CRTC, today denied John Bitove’s (XM Canada’s founder) HDTV Network Inc’s application for an eight city Canadian HDTV broadcast network. The network was to be backed by Microsoft founder and Charter Communication’s chairman, Paul Allen.

Most Canadian cities have few or no digital broadcasters. Global has repeatedly missed the CRTC-imposed deadlines to launch its terrestrial HD broadcast system in Canada. Here, a proven entrepreneur was denied the right to do that which a national Canadian broadcaster is unwilling or unable to do.

Why? Because the network was not committing to broadcast enough local Canadian content. Content that most Canadians neither want nor watch.

It was heartening to see one commissioner, Len Katz, dissent.

Canada’s broadcasting policy is in need of top to bottom reform with an emphasis on market-driven competition and integration with U.S. broadcast and telecom policy. Until then, Canadian consumers are left with an increasingly sub-par and antiquated broadcast system.

Cross-posted to ZNF here.

Update: The San Francisco Chronicle picked up this post here.

Related Posts:

– Using the TiVo Series 3 in Canada (October 15, 2006)