Fibre to the home: Another wonky article
Thanks to a brief (but slightly broken) vacation, the trip to the semi-literate newspaper kingdom that rules New Brunswick was delayed until today when, once again, I came face to face with another wonky article about Bell Aliant's fibre-to-the-home project.
Replacing existing Internet connections with fibre will, apparently, let us watch TV shows and movies on our computers, and even pump them to our TV screens. Isn't that what millions of us have been doing over cable and telephone high speed Internet for years?
After that illuminating bit of news, we learn that Hulu, "jointly owned by Fox Broadcasting Company, NBC and ABC"...actually, it was founded by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which owns Fox Broadcasting) and NBC, while Disney (which owns ABC) bought a minority share earlier this year.
Anyway, we learn 'While man (sic) - mostly in the U.S. - already use this technology, fibre Internet will be more reliable, ending the irritating file-buffering period users have grown accustomed to." What?
Wrong on several counts. First of all, Hulu is, for now, U.S. centric. That has to do with licensing agreements. If you try to access it from Canada, you'll be blocked. Unless, of course, you're clever enough to spoof your location (and yes, there are folks who do that). Secondly, while CTV's clunky TV-over-the-Internet service leaves a lot to be desired, there are plenty of live streaming services that provide clean, unbroken TV and movie streams.
We'll skip over the paragraph about Canadian 'distributers' - can't anybody spell at NB Publishing? - and go right to the end where a quoted expert opines that the fibre-to-the-home project will turn Bell Aliant into a company that is nothing but a dumb pipleline: "That's they're (sic) biggest fear in the world." (No, I guess they can't spell.)
If that's Bell Aliant's biggest fear, then why spend $59 million ($1 million is coming from the Province of New Brunswick) to make your nightmare come true?
My guess is we won't find the answer to that question any day soon in either the Telegraph Journal or the New Brunswick Business Journal.
- G
