Confirmed (almost): U.S. Super Bowl commercials will be on television in Canada this year
As we all pretty well predicted last class, there will be U.S. commercials available through U.S. stations on cable whose $5M per 30 second ads won’t be simultaneously substituted in Canada during Super Bowl LII. Or almost certainly anyways. Now that the Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear Bell’s leave to appeal application on […]
Question of the Week (Class 4): Should there be “should’s” in S. 3 of the Broadcasting Act?
As you may have already noticed S.3 of the Broadcasting Act (S.C. 1991, c. 11) is bit different from most other statutory provisions you might have come across. It is rather full of the word “should”. This is in stark contrast to most statutory drafting norms and, interestingly for our purposes, quite different in style if not […]
Does cord-cutting save money?
Fed up with the rising cost of cable television, consumers have increasingly “cut the cord” on traditional cable television. I’ve been interested in seeing how these services compare and what developments have since occurred in the area of internet television. This is where YouTube TV comes in. YouTube TV offers the same channels as your […]
Social Media Regulating Us?
The central question of our last class was “What should we do about fake news?” This ties into the core question of the course: “To regulate, or not to regulate?” It seems that the Canadian approach, following Grant v. TorStar [2009] allows for an “arguably more flexible and more sophisticated” approach, by allowing for the […]
An App that Detects Net Neutrality Violations
David Choffnes, a researcher from Northeastern University, has created an app that detects net neutrality violations. The app, called Wehe, is designed to test download speeds from seven apps: YouTube, Amazon, NBCSports, Netflix, Skype, Spotify, and Vimeo. Wehe uses your device to exchange traffic recorded from real, popular apps like YouTube and Spotify—effectively making it look as […]
The Impact of Netflix Increasing its Prices
ARTICLE : https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-earnings-analysts-await-update-on-how-price-increases-are-affecting-growth-2018-01-17 Netflix is going to report its fourth quarter earnings next week and the question addressed in this article is : How has their increase in pricing affected its earnings? This article states that Netflix is expected to have : “more than 173% improvement compared with the same quarter a year ago, […]
Question of the Week (Class 3): What should we do about “fake news”?
With all the noise, concern and misdirection around what has come to be known as “fake news”, it’s easy to lose of not only the legal history of addressing similar, if not identical, issues. What seems odd today is that those who shout “fake news” often seem cynically tactical and rarely seem as interested in […]
Question of the Week (Class 2) Poll
With a little help from the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology we now have Polls enabled on this site. With a little luck I’ll have figured out how to enable them and if so a poll on how your feel after our discussions about U.S. Super Bowl commercials on Canadian TV will appear […]
