Split Screen: Home Entertainment and the New Technologies

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

David Ellis, author of Networking: How Are Canada’s English TV
Networks Performing? (Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, 1991), returns
in this book to deal with the future of television in Canada. The book
has implications for public policy development in its examination of
cable monopolies; the domination of the U.S. film industry in Canada
(e.g., pay-per-view on television); the need for heavier regulation of
the broadcast industry vis-а-vis Canadian content; and the need for
more Canadian consumer-protection policies. Ellis also describes the new
technologies: deathstar (DTH) satellites, digital compression,
multimedia computers, CD-ROMs, and cable-telephone linkage and
interfaces.

Although his book is essentially a polemic aimed at government
officials, Ellis has done a fine job of presenting background and
raising issues and questions. Telidon is curiously absent from the
section on videotext, and there is also no mention of the Youth News
Network. The book includes endnotes, a glossary, and a bibliography, but
no index.