Ottawa on Tuesday proposed changes to Canada’s broadcasting regulatory framework that would see it applied to booming online streaming platforms and might require them to contribute cash to support Canadian storytelling.
If passed by parliament, the amendment to the Broadcasting Act would empower the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to apply the same rules as traditional broadcasters to platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Spotify.
It might also compel them to contribute to a fund that supports the creation, production and distribution of Canadian music, film and television, which the government estimates could raise as much as C$830 million (US$625.6 million) by 2023.
“One system for our traditional broadcasters and a separate system for online broadcasters doesn’t work,” Minister of Canadian Heritage Steven Guilbeault told a news conference.
“Our government believes that everyone who benefits from the system should contribute to it fairly,” he said.
However, critics said that the legislative changes do not go far enough.
“The new Broadcasting Act ... is a mess,” tweeted Canadian lawmaker Alexandre Boulerice, of the opposition New Democratic Party.
He accused the government of having “surrendered to Big Tech without a fight.”
The Broadcasting Act has not been updated since 1991 — prior to the advent of the Internet, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberal Party government has been under pressure by Canadian broadcasters to tax Netflix and others to level the playing field.
A government briefing document said that 62 percent of Canadian households now subscribe to Netflix, which last year generated C$1 billion in revenues in Canada.
At the same time, the revenues of traditional radio and television broadcasters are stagnating or declining, along with their contributions to the Canadian content fund.
Guilbeault said that some of the streaming platforms are already spending on Canadian music, television and film productions, but their contributions are only voluntary.
Netflix, for example, in 2017 announced that it would spend C$500 million or 5 percent of its global production budget to make original films and television shows in Canada.
The CRTC, is expected to sort out how the funding requirements would be applied to streaming services over the coming year, Guilbeault said.
User-generated content, online news and video games, would not be subjected to the new rules, the Canadian government said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS