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The report itself is anecdotal in nature. It is a survey of the Canadian Information Highway, or InfoBahn, as it exists now and as it may exist in the not-too-distant future. Since this report was commissioned by the Canadian Independent Film Caucus, whose members are predominately interested in documentary production, Under Construction looks specifically at how the InfoBahn might serve the needs of documentary producers and users.
In Canada the key players are Stentor with its Beacon Initiative and MediaLinx, and Rogers Communications Inc., freshly expanded through the purchase of Maclean Hunter. These companies have been fighting it out at the CRTC, and in the pages of the popular press. By the time this report is in your hands, the CRTC is scheduled to have made the decisions that will shape Canada's InfoBahn, although a lot of that "shape" will be decided by the media moguls in Hollywood, Atlanta, New York, and Tokyo.
Currently the InfoBahn is the Internet/World Wide Web (WWW). Although the Internet has traditionally been a non-commercial distribution network, the WWW has quickly become a major advertising medium. The Web, as its called, is also being used extensively by both American and Canadian media companies to publicize and support more traditional media such as film, television and magazines. There are also a number of WWW sites which encourage alternative distribution of film and video by providing demos of programs and the opportunity to order them on VHS cassette.
On a technological level, the InfoBahn's success is going to depend on a new telecommunications protocol called ATM, which allows for the bi-directional transmission of multimedia data over fibre optic cable. Canada is a leader in ATM research at the Communications Research Centre's BADLAB, and the experimental ATM network OCRInet. ATM-based, broadband networks will make possible low-cost videoconferencing and the "killer application" VOD. But ATM networks are expensive and the VOD trials that are taking place in North America right now are way behind schedule and the preliminary financial results are discouraging.
CD-ROM production and distribution is a major multimedia success story. Documentary producers can look to the CD-ROM model for hints as to how an interactive, multimedia documentary might look and feel. The Videoway interactive TV service in Québec is another model. In Toronto, at Ryerson Polytechnic University they are developing an application/content package called nViews which will provide content users with a modifiable, multimedia version of a news/documentary program accessed on a broadband network. nViews raises interesting questions about the nature of "point of view" filmmaking, and the democratization of the production process.
Throughout the InfoBahn and multimedia/interactive industries the driving economic force is commercial sponsorship. Public sources of financing in Canada seemed to be geared to hardware/software projects or physical deployment of networks. Though the technology can be dazzling at times, with few exceptions the content is less than innovative. Content seems to have been forgotten in the technological rush. For documentary producers partnering with private sponsors brings with it the spectre of corporate influence and subsequent loss of autonomy. But all the industry surveys show that the cost of delivery of these new services far exceeds what an end user is prepared to pay. So like traditional television, the InfoBahn will be an Adbahn as well, a fact that the documentary producer will have to contend with.
Though we have tried to be as accurate as possible, the constantly developing and changing nature of the InfoBahn dictates that by the time this report is in your hands, parts of it will be dated. Even at the final draft, projects changed, companies bought and sold other companies, new technology and software emerged. That is the evolving nature of an InfoBahn that is constantly under construction.