THE new digital channel universe is set to explode onto Canadian television screens this fall. While one of the conditions the CRTC imposed on new licence applicants was to propose interactive elements, networks say the day when most viewers will be able to ask a show host questions in real-time through their TVs is still some time away. For now, interactivity means dozens of new websites supporting the fall launches, from sextvthechannel.com to discoveryhealth.ca to ctvtravel.ca.

BRADY Gilchrist has gone to extremes to make a point. The former Marshall Fenn Communications executive is spending the summer sailing the Great Lakes in his high-tech-equipped boat, reporting on his thoughts about the information age and providing a visual record of his travels for his website, adigitallife.net.

media leaders will meet to discuss the state of convergence at Convergence iTV & Beyond, a two-day conference Aug. 13-14 at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Toronto. The conference will open the floor to new media producers, film and television producers and broadcasters, funding agencies, educators, technology manufacturers and cable providers to offer their insights on the future of popular media.

LIZ EUSTACE is the director of production at Trapeze, a Toronto-based company dedicated to the production of broadband entertainment. In this article she describes her travails of pitching new media strategies to traditional TV broadcasters and producers at the Banff Television Festival, which took place June 10-15.

WHILE long-running Canadian-produced series such as Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and LEXX have made news by changing over from film origination to Sony 24p HDCAM, manufacturers are trying to convince the production community that 24p is not the only digital format suitable for dramatic TV. Breakthrough Films’ new Paradise Falls, airing on Showcase, is proving that point by being the country’s first episodic series to shoot on 480p progressive digital, using Panasonic DVCPRO equipment.

NORSTAR Filmed Entertainment has started shooting its psychosexual thriller Darkness Falling – not to be confused with Norstar’s adaptation of Invisible Darkness, Stephen Williams’ controversial account of the Paul Bernardo and Karla Hamolka story that was rumored months ago to be starring Jason Priestley and confirmed to be a low-budget digital feature.

VANCOUVER: Supermodel Kathy Ireland reprises her role as Santa’s daughter in the TV movie Twice Upon A Christmas: Rudolfa’s Revenge, an update of the Once Upon A Christmas MOW shot here in 2000.

SHOOTING is wrapping up in Calgary on the Hallmark Productions miniseries Roughing It. Budgeted at $8.5 million, the two-part, four-hour project is based on the novel by Mark Twain. Roughing It stars James Garner as the old Mark Twain, in tales of the young Twain’s quest for his calling as a writer.

JASON S.T. KOTLER is a lawyer at the Toronto law firm of McMillan Binch and a member of the firm’s KNOWlawTM Group. This article was prepared with the assistance of DENIS FLEMING.

Alliance Atlantis Communications has put on a show of prominence among the 53rd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards nominees, and not just by Canadian standards.
With 26 nominations spanning five programs, the Toronto house tops the list of multiple nods, coming in just short of The Sopranos (22) and The West Wing (18), with 13 nominations for Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (a copro with IN-Motion AG, in association with Story Line Entertainment).

Vancouver: There will be many production executives in Canada – and maybe even a few in the U.S. – who envy Kevin Beggs, executive VP of series TV for Lions Gate Television. The boyish charmer gets the best of ‘television land’ and ‘television hinterland’ – production power and production subsidy, respectively.
While working for a technically Canadian company, the San Francisco native can keep an L.A. office, lunch with the U.S. network bwanas, cultivate his reputation in the TV power matrix, bask in the greenback-oriented ethos, and fly to the sets of his Vancouver-made, government-supported shows in time for dinner call.
In his hands, program concepts that would otherwise languish in the Finance Department as undercapitalized American shows see the full light of day when he brings them north as six-out-of-10 Cancon shows. And, by using the lucrative tax rebates, he is not burdened by the yoke of Canadiana.

Post-production houses Command Post & Transfer/TOYBOX West and Magnetic North have laid off staff, citing reaction to strike fears as the cause. Although Hollywood studios and networks successfully averted strikes by the Writers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Canadian post industry has already experienced substantial revenue loss.
Before the WGA negotiated its new contract May 4, and SAG and AFTRA followed suit on July 3, Hollywood rushed to get feature films and TV episodes in the can in the event of strike action. With so much of Hollywood’s annual production schedule completed, the number of U.S. projects shooting and posting this summer has been below average.