The current licence per television set in the BBC is £130 per year. If you were to times that by the number of television sets in Canada, you'd probably end up with over $1 billion, which is significant and obviously an opportunity to address some of the chronic underfunding CBC has been dealing with in the last few years.
Certainly you could extend that to looking at Internet provision in this country and ISPs. If there was $1 or $2 per Internet provider per month in the same model, you could also generate a significant opportunity to develop unique Canadian content.
I think what we're seeing in the industry these days is that through sliver castings or snacking, people are looking at very fragmented audiences, looking at very small bits of content. The CBC can really benefit from the huge properties they have currently on radio and television and leverage those online, but there needs to be a way in which they can encourage and develop content in a much broader and more plentiful way.
One of the ways you can do that is to encourage the generation of that content. If content providers have an opportunity--I think there are so many small companies that would be interested in participating in that, as well as internally at CBC--to develop that kind of content and provide it online with some kind of compensation, and that could be simply in its generation, you could have a vibrant and exciting property online.
I think one of the important things to understand as well is that the fragmentation of audiences really benefits the web in the sense that, as we've seen with television programs on CBC television, popular does not necessarily equate with important. It's really an interesting aspect to consider that online we can see that addressing issues...say, for example, the CBC archives online, which provides in-depth and teacher resources in an excellent manner on issues that are of importance to Canadians. This is not being done by many of the other private broadcasters. CBC does have a unique and powerful role to play in this area.