The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission has come out with a long, 181-page report on the state of Canadian media industry, specifically radio and television, and has come back with some surprisingly conservative picture on the adoption and impact of digital media on the business health of the incumbents. Among the biggest of those, it estimates it will be another 10 years before a significant number of Canadians want “on-demand” media, such as video downloads and podcasting. Of course, it is a quasi-regulated market, so that might have something to do with it as well.
The CRTC pointed to the financial health of private TV companies and said they did not appear to have been hurt by new media. It also notes that Canadians in general have been slow in adoption of digital media, despite similar socio-economic conditions to U.S. For example, the Canadian online music market is currently tracking at $18 million annually, which is much less than the $636 million US market… Canada’s lack of penetration of legitimate digital services is underscored by the fact that countries such as the UK, Germany, France and Italy, all of whom have significantly lower broadband penetration than Canada, are capturing considerably more revenues from the authorized download market.
Lots of other stuff. Dive in here in the PDF report, or the HTML version of it.