Get into content and get on the Internet.

In short, ‘Let’s get digital,’ is the executive summary of FuturePlan, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ planning-for-the-Web document launched appropriately, last week (March 28), via webcast.

To say the least, the launch came not a moment too soon, given that ctv, one of cab’s largest members, is poised to be thrust online by telco giant bce.

Introduced as a draft at the cab convention last fall, FuturePlan details how the association can help its members to make the most – in presence, programming and profits – of the cyber phenomenon. (The dense document does not give a timetable for the infamous rollout of digital television, but the cab says it should publish one by May.)

The association has created an online media division headed by vp television Rob Scarth. This division will try to put broadcasters together with companies creating online content such as iceberg.com or ExtendMedia. Says cab president Michael McCabe: ‘We’ll be looking at whether we can play any role with the big players, the Canoes, netgraphes and so on.’

The online division will have to work quickly to update broadcasters’ business plans since FuturePlan assumes the annihilation of current broadcasting business models within a decade. From the document’s ‘Possible Futures’ section:

‘In the next five years, at least 12 new digital services or devices will be rolled out, ranging from new transmission systems to new consumer devices like the personal video recorder (pvr) which adds a hard drive to the tv and allows viewers to watch what they want, when they want, outside the constraints of channel-based program schedules, and also allows them to skip commercials…. There will be battles over the ancillary revenue streams that may be important to help pay for the transition to digital (which will be expensive). And there will be battles to control the changes in the revenue streams that currently support broadcasting – advertising and subscriptions.

‘For example, if the multiplexing of commercials’ – which allows an advertiser to deliver commercials for different products to different households – ‘is controlled by the broadcast distribution undertaking (bdu) rather than the broadcaster or specialty service, then there is a greater likelihood that the potential additional advertising revenue will flow to the bdu rather than the broadcaster.’

Before worrying about how ads are routed to consumers or who makes money from ads online, broadcasters have to cover the costs of building a brand online, developing combined tv-web advertising packages, and delivering audiences. McCabe says the cab plans a major study, to be released next fall, of North American ad markets, and who’s advertising online and why.

Meantime, cab will work with government to find ways to stimulate e-commerce activity in Canada. ‘If you take a look at the budgets of e-commerce firms in the u.s. in particular, half and more of their budgets go to advertising,’ he says. ‘It’s not happening in Canada.’ McCabe says that according to an e-commerce roundtable launched by Industry Canada, one reason Canada lags behind the u.s. in e-commerce is because ‘there was very little dot-com advertising going on that was needed to stimulate this flow of people to the e-commerce sites.’

Similarly, McCabe is anxious to see digital tv moving faster to Canadians. He reckons some 117 stations in major u.s. markets are doing some high-definition or enhanced-definition programming. ‘If we get too far behind [the u.s.],’ he reasons, they’ll just take over.

FuturePlan identifies numerous other public policy challenges for Canada, including setting a cutoff date for analog transmissions in favor of digital, establishing priority carriage of digi-signals, carriage and pass-through of supplementary services and, no doubt, how to make the technologies speak to each other.