The Nielsen Music 2017 Year-End Report shows overall consumption of albums, songs and On-Demand Audio streaming grew 13.6 per cent year-over-year and on Dec. 3 surpassed the 900 million per week mark for the first time. R&B/Hip-Hop was Canada’s fastest-growing music genre of the year, with an 86 per cent increase in streaming consumption over 2016. Download the full report here.
theScore has launched the first-ever fantasy sports game for the Instant Games platform on Messenger and Facebook News Feed. theScore Fantasy Sports offers contests for NFL Football, NBA Basketball, NHL Hockey, and EPL Soccer, with support for more leagues coming soon. Since launching just over a year ago, the Instant Games platform now offers more than 70 games.
Connect to Innovate, along with in-kind funding from the Province of Manitoba and Indigenous Services Canada, will see $83.9 million put into building digital backbone networks to get 112 rural and remote communities online and able to access high-speed Internet. Of those 112 communities, 48 are First Nations and 21 located in regions without year-round road access. First Nations-owned Clear Sky Connections will receive the bulk of the funding ($33.5 million) to provide 72 communities with online access, while the rest of funding will be distributed between Valley Fiber Ltd. ($10.3 million), Bell MTS ($2.7 million) and Broadband Communications North ($673,000).
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has announced that it’s the first Canadian public sector incubator to take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) programs available for Canadian public sector startups. Projects from CIRA’s Community Investment Program will have access to a variety of AWS programs to help scale up online activities and accelerate delivery of new products and services.
