Mobile Ownership, Streaming TV On The Rise

The CRTC clues in to what any person who's ever watched the Daily Show on an iPhone already knows.

Nearly every person in Canada will have a mobile phone by 2014, landlines will continue to disappear, and more and more people will stream television on their computers, according to a CRTC study. Some 85 per cent of the country, or 29.5 million people, will have mobile phones in three years, with more than half of those likely to be smartphones. Parallel growth in “cord cutting”, or homes without a landline, is expected, as half of all people between the ages of 18-34 already live landline-free. Cisco Systems predicts that Internet traffic will quadruple by 2014, bolstered by the quarter of Anglo Canadians and the fifth of French Canadians who watch programs online. The CRTC says these trends point to the need for the broadcast regulator to overhaul its policies, although to us, that just sounds like streaming American television shows on Megavideo could get a lot more unnecessarily cumbersome.