Ministry of Investment

Apti had been expecting the call. Still she was slightly startled when her mobile went off. ‘Bit of a buzz kill’, she thought, making a mental note not to schedule work so close against defrag time. Reaching for the device, barely looking, she muted the glassy melody with a swipe of her hand. Illumination in the room rose slowly as the meditation sequence dissolved away in the homeoffice automation system, a standard feature in BellRBC Residences. A fresh pot of chai started in the kitchen. In a few minutes she’d be enjoying the aroma.

Stretching in her task chair, Apti reaching for the ceiling before commanding, “OK, pick up.” The screen lit up with a friendly face, familiar and tinted with that popular filter. She thought to herself, couldn’t they come up with a better filter by now?

“Hello my old friend!” Apti spoke into the camera, picking up her device on the way to the kitchen. Today was Helen’s birthday. Helen and Apti became close at University. Helen got the job at Rogers Media the same week Apti got hers at BellRBC, right after graduation. They had managed to stay in touch over the years but it’s been getting harder. The two companies’ networks were so heavily firewalled, it was now officially futile to video call from one to the other without some kind of disruption – glitches were notorious. Body calls were even less reliable – too many dropped polygons. But this nonsense was really only a problem with Helen. Most of her friendnet was on BellRBC.

She’d heard of a workaround to access one network from the other, but they weren’t legal. Apti heard of people in the city who could breach both firewalls. They are called Switchers – they manually tap into both fiber-optic hard lines and setup gateways to access content from both networks through a single access point. They then offer these points up to people who want to watch content from both networks. She was tempted. Last year a show was advertised on the billboards in the city centre that she wanted to see, but Rogers brokered the deal first. It would be two years before the Right to Syndication provision kicked in and her provider could option the show for download.

In mid call came another interruption from her device. “5 o’clock – Josh. Dentist.” Apti had forgotten that her son had an appointment today. Or maybe it had just been moved up by the dentist’s office? No matter, it wouldn’t have been rescheduled if it there were a conflict with anything else in her schedule. Josh’s resident private school was connected to the Health and Wellbeing Centre on the west side of her BellRBC campus. She’d need fifteen minutes to get from the homeoffice tower across the park to the school.

This week marked the start of her second year on Project Mercury, the integrated content and commerce platform set to roll out in all BellRBC networked homes in the country. Mercury promised to bring complete merchandise integration to all streams served across the network. Apti knew this was not revolutionary technology or solution – after all, Googlezon rolled it out in the States nearly two years ago – but it’d taken more time than expected to negotiate the cross-border trade issues and distribution strategies. Sometimes the global content market was not as seamless as the rhetoric suggested. Apti also suspected that the Board needed to see the technology proven before it would commit the time and resources, and they knew Rogers was doing the same thing.

Apti could hear Josh in the kitchen getting ready. She glanced at the time and thought, better get the show on the road. She was free to work whatever hours she chose, so as long as the work got done and she made her numbers for the quarter – and there was much to do.

Ministry of Investment – Background Context

A commercially driven, risk-averse environment dominated by the two biggest telecom conglomerates in the country, who move in lock step with each other.

By 2020 the two major Canadian telecommunications companies had emerged as the biggest businesses in the country. They began to achieve this dominant position after realizing in the late 00s that the key to their survival was not only controlling the pipe that brought streams to people’s homes, but owning – or at least having privileged access to – the content itself.

Consumers had waged a pitched battle against usage-based billing (UBB), with repeated social media campaigns, including the creative “Dark Days” boycott. However in the country with some of the highest telecom fees and poorest service of any OECD nation, regulations were sculpted around the interests of large, cash-rich incumbents. Consumers lost, and both BellRBC and RogersMedia began to meter and charge households on their Internet use in a manner similar to today’s utilities. Bandwidth became a commodity in Canada, and BellRBC and RogersMedia were allowed to set its price quarterly, based on the cost of acquiring and delivering content, as well as maintaining the networks.

Perhaps the farthest-reaching consequence of this duopolistic, vertically integrated, bandwidth-as-commodity regime was a new model of paying for content that was indistinguishable from paying for Internet access. Effectively they were now one in the same. The more content a household or business consumed, the higher the bill. Every address in the country was either a Rogers or BellRBC customer, but never both. Consumers sign exclusivity contracts that include all telecommunications services and devices. The Canadian content market by 2020 was streamlined in comparison with the fractured landscape around the turn of the century. Both BellRBC and RogersMedia operated in a bid-driven fashion to option content, with premiums paid to fixed-term exclusivity; Rogers might pick up a show and make it available to their network 12–24 months sooner than BellRBC, provided it was willing to pay a premium to do so.

By 2019 both BellRBC and RogersMedia had made appeals for lengthy (even unlimited) exclusivity rights, but the CRTC ultimately ruled against that, putting two-year caps on all distribution deals with exclusivity charges. The only exception to this rule was the netcasting of sporting events. The CRTC mandated that BellRBC and Rogers negotiate a method to license the various events and teams that each company owned. And most teams were now owned by one of these two companies.

Casual content piracy by consumers, of concern to large publishers if no one else, became a rarity as streamed delivery gradually became the norm. The acquisition and collection of content is no longer the goal of consumers. The youth generation in 2020 have never known the tangible experience of purchasing a record, or a CD, or even going to a bricks and mortar retail store to browse for new releases. There arose a generation that did not covet the artifacts of creativity, but placed greater value on being able to access it.

Innovation slowed but found its niches, as always. Tribes of proficient users – Switchers – found novel ways to connect the nets, manipulate service caps and adapt subscription-based cloud storage. Yet few new commercial services were borne. Canada continued to earn a “D” for Innovation from the Conference Board’s Report Card. The rise of Usage Based Billing, which had cut off the air supply to piracy, had the same impact on innovative social and creative media startups. Meanwhile users, placated by Hollywood shows and basic time- and place-shifting, continued to surrender disposable income in large quantities to the duopoly. Most no longer perceived that they were paying for individual content assets. They now seemed happy to have free to access whatever they wanted – provided it was in network and fit the billing plan.

Content delivery was not limited to film, music and television, but grew almost seamlessly to include books and magazines, which were rarely found in printed form. Magazine publishers stopped printing and shipping on dead trees after the protracted energy crisis of 2015–16. With the exception of a few lavish titles, they simply couldn’t afford to make the physical product or move it to consumers. A few hybrid forms integrating video and text, took hold. With the rise of bandwidth anxiety came an unexpected plateau of rich social media in mid-decade, taking the wind out of the sails for many research and commercialization experiments.

Canadian producers came to rely on the Canada Media Fund, which was renamed in 2017 to the Canadian Content Fund (CCF). The cost of production fell to less than a quarter of what it was a decade prior, but the content-as-commodity business model put a downward pressure on distribution rights. There were a few notable successes in the Canadian media industries – companies producing stories that appealed not just to a home market but to global audiences.

The toughest decision affecting Canadian content producers by 2020 was the type of distribution deal they might accept. Some opted for the short-term win of exclusive distribution with Rogers or BellRBC, but these usually carried with them a clause allowing the licensee to resell international rights, providing only a small portion of the profit back to producers. The alternative was for producers to go to the global market directly, a higher-risk proposition but one that had lead to several surprisingly successful franchises. Whenever an independent production company garnered a number of big ‘wins’, in either the domestic or, more significantly, global market, the company typically became an acquisition target by BellRBC or Rogers. This merger and acquisition trend became clear just prior to 2020, following a path seen in the high technology industries, a decade prior.

MIPCOM, the annual content exchange event held in Cannes every year, became virtual and truly global, re-branding itself as the Global Content Exchange. It began to operate in a manner similar to a stock exchange, except what was being bought, sold and optioned was content. New arms of media companies were spawned as a result, functioning as brokers who watched the value of content assets rise and fall based on supply and demand. Mechanisms were put in place allowing brokers to short sell, purchase on margin, and issue warrants on content assets that were predicted to perform well.

The name of the game in the Ministry of Investment is content as commodity – with success going go to those that command their share of minds and markets.

Facilitated and written by Spencer Saunders
Illustration by Ryan Lake

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