Canada’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has decided that incumbent Bell Canada can charge its wholesale ISP customers based on the bandwidth usage of their end users, as first reported by CBCNews.ca. This decision puts pressure on smaller ISPs that are using Bell’s network infrastructure to implement bandwidth caps similar to those the telco is imposing on its own customers, or significantly raise prices for unmetered accounts.

Bell’s new wholesale pricing structure includes bandwidth limits of as little as 2 GB per month for the lowest-priced wholesale DSL account and charges of as much as C$1.75 ($1.59) for each GB above that limit. Customers of resell ISPs will be able to subscribe to higher tiers if they’re wiling to pay more, but Bell’s highest cap stands at 60 GB per month. Good luck to all those Canadian HD video startups. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

TVU Networks this week introduced PVR-like functionality for its P2P TV platform, letting subscribers record 300 or so live TV channels from around the world, including Cartoon Network, BBC World News and Telemundo. Users can record shows in real time or schedule them for later. Due to the nature of the service, however, there’s no TiVo-like programming guide available; Mountain View, Calif.-based TVU essentially picks up signals from its broadcast partners and redistributes them with the help of P2P technology.

That also means users have to install the startup’s software in order to make use of the DVR functionality — or watch any of the TV channels in real time, for that matter. And finally, they have to cough up $2 per month for TVU’s DVR service. But while all these factors make the service seem unlikely to succeed, something tells me that TVU’s audience is a forgiving one. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

My colleague Liz Gannes published a great piece titled “Copyright Meets a New Worthy Foe: The Real-Time Web” over at Newteevee today. The main premise: Traditional DMCA take-down notices can’t keep up with Ustream and Justin.tv anymore. Users can just jump onto streams in no time, and live events may be over before anyone could even send out an appropriate notice.

One of the aspects of the article that found really intriguing was the combination of the live web and the social graph:

“Ustream CEO John Ham says he’s seen live video feeds go from zero to a million viewers faster than ever before after being shared on Facebook and Twitter.”

Liz doesn’t present a definite solution to this problem, probably because there isn’t just one, but she does hint at a few possibilities, one of them being this:

“(I)t’s not easy for people who start aligned as enemies to become friends. If sports leagues were to embrace Justin.tv as their viral marketing engine…well, that would be something.” Read more »

Google has added video recording capabilities to the HTC G1 through an update of its Android operating system that was sent out wirelessly to T-Mobile customers this week. Android version 1.5, code-named Cupcake, also features video sharing via YouTube, email and MMS.

Bruce Lidl did a great first write-up of the new features earlier this week, but we couldn’t resist giving Android’s video recording a shot as well.

First the facts. The G1 records 3gp videos encoded with the h.263 video codec. There are two recording modes: High-quality offers you a resolution of 352×288 and a 360 Kbps bit rate while the low-quality setting comes with a resolution of 176×144 and a bit rate of 192 Kbps. How does all of that look? Well, see for yourself. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.