Charles E. Frees-Melvin's WebHome

Today I seem ads on CTVGlobeMedia stations that are urging the government to require cable/satellite distributors to pay for distributing the signal. I think this is just plain wrong. Here in Saint John there are 4 broadcast stations CBAT (CBC Fredericton but licensed and has its main transmitter in Saint John), CKLT (Has no programming differences from CJCH (CTV Atlantic) in Halifax, NS), CIHF-TV-2 (a semi satellite of CIHF-TV known as Global Maritimes from Halifax.), and CBAFT-1 which is a re-transmitter of CBAFT the Radio-Canada Moncton feed.
When it comes to local programming CTV is the absolute worst, as I have noted before at most has 2 stories from the Saint John area and 4-5 total from the entire Province of New Brunswick on a good day. Global TV despite their severe cut backs have managed to keep their news stories basically equal per province.
The basics is that all 4 of these broadcasters offer their signals for free over-the-air (a.k.a. poverty-vision). The cable company simply re-transmits the feed via an antenna to cables to the subscribers. Why should we pay to have something that we get for free anyway? In fact this even benefits the TV stations by making it more convenient to watch the stations resulting in more viewers rather than switching over to better content from away. Thus removing ad dollars.

In less dense markets like the Maritimes TV must come up with a different model in order to survive. Depending on a single news program is clearly not the way to go, but neither is alienating the viewers by making some pay, while others do not. Do we consider a TV tax like the United Kingdom? I don’t thinks so either but fees must not be duel standard. The CRTC recently made a decision that requires distributors to no longer require a bundle of channels. In this schema you can choose to not purchase stations, adding fees will just doom local programming to certain failures.

If you want to see more about this CTV is promoting the site http://www.ctv.ca/savelocal/.

With the recent water bans an the lack of news coverage in the wee hours of the evening I was pondering if there was a better way for the City of Saint John to post urgent notices. And I had thought of using the technology of today, and an approach of making it easier to opt-in to these methods.

Part 1: Electronic Internet

Provide an RSS feed with no longer than a text message sized message detailing the urgent message. This would allow people the opportunity to place a box on the most common web portals that 60% of people use as home pages.

Secondly allow people to register their e-mail addresses to an urgent message list. This would allow people to get it by e-mail or text message as people can put in cellnumber@pcs.rogers.com or cellnumber@txt.aliant.net and have it sent to your cell (great for parking bans.)

Step 2: Phone

Have an Advisory line like the parking one and have a cheep automated text to voice system to read the RSS feed messages.

Why do the cell phone companies make it so hard on you to find a phone that suits “you.” I have been on the hunt now for the predecessor to my Nokia 6620 that is now cloning in on a four year old design of a phone. I wasn’t even lucky enough to have a battery covered by the recall since that is the main issue I am currently having with it.

My phone runs off of the S60 second generation Symbian OS, and I really like it, now if I could just find a GSM phone with the 3rd Gen. But nobody seems to offer the thing, sure some people play music on their phones but I have an iPod Nano so that is not really important to me, neather is cell phone gamming, but I like the option to install whatever programs I want as the Symbian OS has loads of programming that in most cases is higher quality than a lot of what you can get from the Java that most phones offer.

I also like that GDM is more secure as it never goes back to analoge mode, and the ability to move my contacts from phone to phone easily on the SIM card, amd the global nature of the GSM technology. So CDMA/1X is not really an option.

Anyways that is my rant. I really like the Blackberry Pearl but a $35 data plan for 4MB is crazy.