No Pandora For Canada
It appears that Pandora will not be comming into Canada for quite some time.
In a letter to the Financial Post, Pandora founder Tim Westergren stated that the music streaming service has shelved their plans to expand into Canada because “the rates that have been proposed by the Canadian music rights societies are simply uneconomic”.
The Financial Post had previously published a story about the viability of web radio, resulting in this response by Pandora, a service that features over 80,000 artists, many of which are independent.
One of the few services that have made it’s way north is Rdio and Slacker, services from which music can be streamed from the web to personal computers for $4.99 a month.
An Interesting Link On The Anti-Spam Law
A short article on the new Canadian anti-spam law can be found here.
Maclean Magazine Scorns Canadians
Appearently Maclean believes that Canadian consumers are being unfair about usage based billing, and that we all want free access to the internet.
This Rogers Communications owned publication thinks that because they believe average users aledgely only use 16 gigabites per month that anyone going over this amount should be subjected to higher fees, just because some 2% of users download “hundreds of gigs worth” per month.
Is this what they call “Fair” ? And where did they get that 16 gigabite per month figure ?
My average use is at about 40 gigs per month at the moment because of Youtube and i’m sure Netflix users have a similar rate. I am not an “average user” ?
It’s obvious that legitimate online television and film content streaming have resulted in a hike in average use and that 16 gig figure will not cut it.
There are already hundreds of internet ready devices, including televisions and blu-ray players, that enable families to view film and television from the internet. And these devices are getting more and more affordable each day so the “average” use will likely surpass 50 or 60 gigs per month soon, if it hasn’t already.
Cloud computing will also drive some of these transfers up, as more and more people use this new technology from their home, so usage based billing is no response.
Canadian Anti-Spam Bill Comes Into Force
Bill C-28 came into force yesterday.
As a member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email for over a decade and participating member of the Task Force On Spam, I had waited for years for anti-spam legislation to pass in Canada. But of course the proposed bills appeared to have major issues until now.
Hopefully the spammers will leave Canada in response to this legislation, like they did in Australia, the U.K and USA when those countries passed anti-spamming legislation. And yes, this legislation covers those costly text spams, unless these are non-commercial solicitations (charities/political parties).
Additional information on this new legislation can be found at the Industry Canada web site.
Stop The Meter – National Day Of Action
On Saturday, the 26th of February, several protests against usage based billing will take place across the nation.
Details on your local events can be found at http://openmedia.ca/local.
Teksavvy Suspends Usage Based Billing
Teksavvy has decided to suspend their plans to implement usage based billing in response to the customer revolt that resulted in nearly half a million signatures on the openmedia.ca online petition.
Usage based billing was to be implemented at Teksavvy on March 1st, 2011. But the consumer complaints had flooded in so quickly that even Bell has decided to look for alternatives to usage based billing, according to The Wire Report.