After leaving the class on Monday evening a couple thoughts struck me from the discussion with Susan Ross.  The main point being her feeling and perhaps the feelings of Corus as a whole with regards to the current shifts in technology and entertainment.  The sense I got from her was the expected “wait and see.”  In retrospect this could be based on a few significant reasons: Firstly, this may actually be the attitude held by Corus as they might well believe that waiting is the best strategy.  Secondly, the current state of the economy is likely a factor resulting in less investment in new technologies and experimental revenue streams.  For Corus, as Ross explained, “keeping to what we know,” might very well be the best option.  Finally, there is the chance that perhaps Ross did not want to give away some key secrets that the company may have plans for in the future. I find it interesting to compare the path taken by Corus versus what I’ve read in the past couple of weeks regarding Netflix and other CES offerings.  In my opinion Netflix is doing all the right things.  Two weeks ago they introduced HD streaming on top of their already stable web/television entertainment services.  Compared to what we are seeing in the Canadian market as consumers and what we heard from Ross there seems to be few mainstream ventures in technological evolution.  Granted the infrastructure is not the same and the costs associated with creating a wider consumer market are quite different than in the States, it still feels like slow motion. My specific question was related to changes in children programming and how it will or should evolve in Ross’s opinion.  There was the example of the Tree House Direct failure which seemed to be a retreat from a now rapidly expanding market.  Of all audiences children want to be involved and active in the toys they receive, the movies they watch and the media they consume.  Although Tree House Direct appeared to be a different way for getting the same content, I would think that these directions need to be explored further.  Perhaps everyone’s quest to bring TV to the computer is the wrong solution.  We should be bringing the social nature of the web to the big screen.

Probably the most popular options for running virtual machines on the Mac are one of two options: Parallel Desktop or VMware Fusion. Both are good working options but neither of them, aside from the trial, are free.   For those of you looking for a free way to experiment with foreign operating systems give Virtualbox a try.  It's an Open Source virtualizer that can handle a large range of OS's including the recently released Windows 7 Beta. Earlier this week Virtualbox was updated and now supports the guest Additions for Windows 7 which make it that much more functional.