Sometimes it's best not to follow the trend

About the only thing we can say with confidence about media trends, is that they occur faster than most of us can keep up with them. “Everybody” always seems to be about two years ahead of us.

In the world of television and radio, even the federal regulators acknowledge they cannot keep up, as higher and higher numbers of Canadians (currently reported to be more than 25 per cent of us) unplug from traditional suppliers of content, and go online.

Peter Menzies, a vice chairman of the CRTC told an audience that his organization “can no longer define ourselves as gatekeepers in a world in which there may be no gates.”

No gates? Peter, you are years behind. It's not that there are no gates to keep, but too many to keep track.

If Menzies doesn't like that observation, he may have grounds for reply. On the contrary, he might say, it's not that there are now infinite gates through which Canadians can access TV and radio content, it's that almost all of them are owned and controlled by only  three massive media conglomerates.

In the past few days, the CRTC closed another independent gate to TV and radio content, by allowing Bell Media to purchase Astral Media, in a merger worth $2.8 billion.

BCE, the 2,000-kg gorilla on the Canadian media scene, also owns Bell Mobility (among many other assets). Bell Mobility offers smartphone data plan users some 43 channels of TV content — 12 of which are owned by Bell. That includes CTV, TSN, Much Music, Movie Network, Family Channel, Teletoon and others.

In Canada, it appears that the way to adapt to the rapid rate at which people are unplugging from cable and satellite plans, is to also own the content that customers pay to access though other means.

Over the weekend, one customer decided Canada's media content and distribution system needs a shakeup.

Benjamin Klass, a grad student at the University of Manitoba, filed a formal complaint to the CRTC, that Bell was using its vast presence in the industry to unfair advantage.

Smartphone and tablet owners pay a monthly data plan, so they can watch their favourite shows online, anytime, any place.

They pay the same way some of us still pay for long distance phone calls — by the minute. Except they're not charged by the minute, but by the volume of data they download.

Subscribers pre-pay for a set amount of data per month, and they watch movies and TV in their bedrooms and at the mall — and hope they don't exceed their data limit, which can be quite costly.

Most customers have no idea what their Gigabyte limit is, or how fast they use it — until after they get their bills.

That's a side issue. Klass asserts Bell is charging people an 800-per-cent markup on downloads, when the content is not from a Bell-owned channel.

If you have the Bell Mobile TV app on your smartphone, you get an extra 5 Gb of data to download — from mostly Bell channels, naturally. If you go over your limit, you are charged $3 per additional hour. A customer without the app will pay $51 for that much content, over and above their monthly plan limit (which most customers don't track very closely at all).

Klass says that's unfair use of Bell's overwhelming presence in the industry. Taken to its logical end, customers' choices will soon be to buy Bell data plans and watch Bell content exclusively, or pay through the nose.

Bell, Shaw and Telus already hold more than 90 per cent of the market. That whole gamut includes internet access, phone access, TV content and online radio content.

Streaming audio and video was supposed to open infinite gates to a universe of choices for people. In many ways they have.

But the system runs on money. The digital revolution cost the music industry billions. In 1999, we are told global music sales were around $38 billion. With the onset of options like iTunes (and piracy) that figure fell to something like $16 billion a year today.

The wider industry is determined not to let that happen to them. So a few giant players have vertically integrated. They own the TV shows, the networks that air them, plus the cable and satellite systems that distribute them, as well as the online alternatives to see them.

What gates are left for the CRTC to keep? They can't even enforce Canadian content rules any longer.

Canadians who unplugged from what they thought were oppressive cable plans will have fewer choices, not more. It will be the restrictive (and increasingly exclusive) plans offered by the Big Three, or pay through the nose for every byte of data.

Those of us who fell behind the media trends will miss out on some good content, while saving money to buy the services of a niche provider that will someday find a way around this insanity.