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9604 Commissioner Cram. 9605 COMMISSIONER CRAM: For your information, gentlemen, what happens is each of us will ask each of you questions. And it is Mr. Zielke? 9606 Mr. Zielke in your presentation -- and you will excuse my preoccupation with grammar -- you used the plural, "We had the experimental licence". You talked about "our initiative" and the pent-up demand for "our services". Are you part of a group that is supporting this? Can you tell me what -- 9607 MR. ZIELKE: I understand that this is an application for a licence by an individual. His application is based on a community outreach program that I volunteered on for the last few years. So when I say "we", I am taking some licence, but it is based on my sense that this is a community initiative. I am part of a non-profit group that is going to work specifically on a show about ecology. But really I am just, I guess, saying that I have always felt that it is a community initiative and it is testimony to a sense of trust that I have that this initiative will be very rooted in the community. 9608 COMMISSIONER CRAM: And when the experimental licence was there, how long was it operating? 9609 MR. ZIELKE: It must have been a couple of months, three months. How long was it? Six months, yes. 9610 COMMISSIONER CRAM: And were you providing that program "A Sense of Place" then at all? 9611 MR. ZIELKE: No, no. This was definitely trial by fire for me. I arrived to man the phones one day and the person who was going to do the control panel didn't show up, and so the person who was going on air manned the control panel. I was live on the air interviewing the budget chief of the City of Toronto, Tom Jakobek, who taught me a lot about interviewing on the air very quickly and I have to admit I did get a buzz for the imperative of the live. I really appreciate the commitment in this application for the live which I think goes back to what was a potential for this technology in the 50s that somehow got lost. I am not sure how. 9612 So I was always a volunteer and I have always done everything from writing press releases to going out to the community to talk about it, you know, I think Jan had me sweep up many times too. 9613 COMMISSIONER CRAM: And have you or your group, the Ashbridge Bay Watershed Council, ever approached either Shaw or Rogers to gain access to their community channel? 9614 MR. ZIELKE: No, and there are a couple of reasons there: a) I don't have cable, so my wife and kids wouldn't be able to see me and most of my friends don't have cable either, and, b) where would I go to do this show? I would basically have to kind of contradict the guiding philosophy which is a place-based approach to produce a show. So for those two reasons, I have been involved in a lot of outreach and I see the value of television, but certainly for the circle of people who I work with as opposed to the advertisers, their first question is, "Can you get it on the air?" 9615 Of course, I support that this station has to be on cable apart from this. 9616 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. 9617 Commissioner Demers. 9618 COMMISSIONER DEMERS: Mr. Loucks, you first started by the anecdote of the fact that you saw Mr. Pachul's broadcasting experience on your television screen. 9619 Did you see any program -- you referred only to the fact that there was a telephone number, but could you explain more what you saw? 9620 MR. LOUCKS: What I had seen was a type of a test pattern and it had the name Star Ray TV on it and it had a type of call sign. It sort of struck me as being one of those amateur radio-type call signs. I think it was VA3AMK -- I am just taking from memory -- and that was on for about 20 minutes or so. Actually I had turned the TV off because I had to step out in the evening, and on my return home, when I first called Mr. Pachul I had received his answering service and then I left a message and he had telephoned me back, and after I heard the message I turned the TV on and there was a movie playing. It was a type of a science fiction movie. It struck me as being an early 60s-type movie anyway. 9621 That is all I could really describe of the TV reception at the time. 9622 COMMISSIONER DEMERS: Thank you. 9623 You referred to the importance for you of local programming that this station would provide. This station's coverage would cover about 900,000 people. 9624 Can you explain such a coverage in the locality being 900,000 people what you see as local programming that would answer what you wish to see? 9625 MR. LOUCKS: Well, local programming, I seem to follow politics and what politicians do, particularly in the city quite a bit, and I do catch things on the news and I know there are a lot of things that the news -- really they don't have the time to allow politicians to speak like in an open forum or an interview. 9626 When I think of the community, I think of many different associations and groups in the community and people who don't necessarily have access to large commercialized television stations. That could include certain types of hobbyists or business people or minor sports leagues or athletics. 9627 It could also include musicians. Some of them could be up-and-coming bands and musicians that are undiscovered. I do know a few musicians in the community, and I know that there is a certain protocol or establishment that they have to go through to be recognized as musicians, like in the recording industry or in the community itself. 9628 Basically, community TV I would look at it -- I have seen the cable Community Channel, and I have seen some of the things that they do cover or programs that are on CBC which strike me as being -- they go in depth. 9629 I believe there is a show called The National. There was a show that went in depth on certain subjects in the community, or shows such as David Suzuki. That is how I see community TV, where you are dealing with issues and people in the community itself. 9630 COMMISSIONER DEMERS: Thank you. 9631 This is my last question. This representation, this intervention that you make, is in your own name. You are not representing a group. You are not part of the former speaker's group. 9632 MR. LOUCKS: That is correct. I met Mr. Pachul, and everything I am saying here today -- basically I submitted the intervention. 9633 He had described to me -- I agree with him that he had a good idea. He described to me how the intervention procedure worked, so I had submitted a written intervention and then I had indicated I wished to appear here today. 9634 I am appearing solely as a TV viewer myself. I am not representing any group in the community. But I do have knowledge and an understanding of what people like in the community or what is happening in the community, including TV viewing as well. 9635 I had mentioned that some persons would be unable to -- for example, they wouldn't necessarily be able to afford cable services for financial reasons. I sort of presumed that because I know there are people who are paying a fairly high rent and they don't have enough income. Some people are on fixed income. 9636 I hear people all the time in the city, Toronto, talking about that they don't have money for groceries and there are people who don't have telephone service. I just presume that they don't have access to community TV on cable. 9637 As for myself, I don't use cable service by choice, because I only watch TV for a few hours of the day, if I am ever home. 9638 COMMISSIONER DEMERS: The knowledge you have of what the other people, neighbours or others in the neighbourhood, is through what? It is through just normal life or through professional activities? 9639 MR. LOUCKS: It is just through day to day activities. I could meet people in the local cafe or coffee shop. I meet people through friends; many different outlets in the community. Friends of friends and acquaintances. 9640 I don't have any ties to any special interest groups or cliches in the community, or anything like that. I pretty much just go to work and come home, kind of thing, see things as I go along in life. 9641 COMMISSIONER DEMERS: Thank you, Mr. Loucks. 9642 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. 9643 Commissioner McKendry. 9644 COMMISSIONER McKENDRY: Thank you, Madam Chair. 9645 Mr. Walters, I did have a question for you, based on your written submission, about the Buffalo station and the interference. I took it from your written intervention that that was a concern for you, that Mr. Pachul's service might interfere with your reception of that signal. 9646 But I understand now, from your oral submission, that Mr. Pachul's service is a plus. 9647 MR. WALTERS: I was actually concerned from Mr. Pachul's perspective that maybe on the fringes of his reception range he would find too much interference from that station and miss out on a few viewers. 9648 COMMISSIONER McKENDRY: I see. I understand that now. Thank you. 9649 Let me ask you this: You talked about the importance of the kind of programming that is being proposed to you and to others in your community. One of the things that we often hear is that the Internet is now, or very shortly will be, the way for people to express themselves in this community based sense of place perspective. 9650 Do you have any thoughts about whether or not the Internet can be a substitute or is a substitute for the kinds of things that are being talked about from a community development perspective in this application? 9651 MR. WALTERS: I think the Internet is a good medium, but I don't think it would ever be a perfect substitute. You have to be sitting at your computer and actively participating, reading the information that is on the Internet, versus television which you can have on while you are doing other chores in the house, or whatever. 9652 The television medium, I think is quite important and will always be quite relevant. 9653 COMMISSIONER McKENDRY: Mr. Zielke, I wonder if you have any comments on that. I would assume your group probably uses the Internet. 9654 MR. ZIELKE: Yes. For two years I worked with a non-profit group called Web Networks, which assisted other non-profits using the Internet. I got very deeply involved in the Internet. 9655 There is a technical thing that is very interesting, and that is in the Internet everyone talks about bandwidth and this kind of stuff. And Jan, in his inimitable fashion, informed of the bandwidth that is happening on UHF, which is something like 25 to 30 megabytes -- not "bits". Right? It's bytes per second. 9656 I have Bell high speed at home, and I spend a lot of time on the Internet and I have worked on different access projects in getting video on the Internet. We are looking at three to five years. 9657 That is an interesting purely technical issue. 9658 The second one that I think is interesting is that when I worked at Web Networks I met a lot of people who had a difficulty with the entire computer base kind of thing, and I think that is something to respect and consider. 9659 The other thing that is extremely fascinating is that the way that the plant is set up now -- I noticed that a lot of TV shows started looking like Web sites. One of my jobs at Web was to design Web sites for churches, activists, labour unions. So I got into the design. 9660 I started looking at TV screens and saying what is going on here. Why are all these TV screens looking like Web sites? They even have the drop down menu. It seemed kind of bizarre. 9661 My own sense is that people want downstream. UHF is downstream. That is major downstream. And if anything, I see the potential -- because the plant is set up so that whatever is on this computer screen now we can broadcast. 9662 Imagine the possibilities of broadcasting using videoconferencing. This is quite amazing: the meetings that people could have that could then be shared and witnessed that could be broadcast over UHF using Internet technologies. 9663 What I'm interested in now, which is the sort of three to five year term, is how we can use the Internet to gather content which will then display through a very accessible medium. That to me is really exciting. I could see even doing programming which was -- you know, Web sites, the penetration there. 9664 How we successfully used the Internet in the last three or four years is how it is being used, and that is: What is the killer application? It is e-mail. That is the killer sort of deal here. 9665 And the whole thing was organized by e-mail. How we organized, you know, these hundreds of hours of volunteering and, evenings and all this stuff, was using e-mail effectively. 9666 COMMISSIONER McKENDRY: Thank you very much. 9667 Those were my questions, Madam Chair. 9668 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your participation |