Canadian telecommunications company TELUS is joining the Entertainment Technology Center at University of Southern California’s (ETC@USC) exploration of the issues facing the entertainment and technology industries.
ETC@USC (www.etcenter.org), a non-profit consortium that brings together top entertainment and consumer electronics companies to listen to and evaluate consumer mindshare towards future technologies, is welcoming TELUS as a gold sponsor. TELUS is a Canadian telecommunications carrier with 12.3 million customer connections across wireless, wireline, Internet and IP-based television.
“We are so pleased to have TELUS as a new gold ETC@USC sponsor. As a communications provider that serves millions of Canadians and leading the way in the development of IP-based television, healthcare, and enterprise services in Canada, TELUS brings a wealth of expertise to ETC and we look forward to continuing to explore the issues facing the entertainment and technology industries with our new sponsor,” said David Wertheimer, CEO and Executive Director of ETC@USC.
As a gold sponsor, TELUS will participate in ETC’s technical advisory board, cross-industry Entertainment Technology Roundtables, ETC’s Anytime/Anywhere Consumer Research, Student Feedback Forums, and in the Anytime/Anywhere Content Lab (AACL), Consumer 3D Experience Lab, and other exclusive meetings, which will aid in the furthering of ETC’s mission. The goal of these sponsorship programs is to provide invaluable guidance and technical resources for the products of the future — and for the companies that make them.
“In just a decade, TELUS has gone from a handful of regional phone companies earning three-quarters of its revenue from traditional phone services to a global telecommunications carrier earning three-quarters of our revenue from emerging data and wireless services,” says Ibrahim Gedeon, chief technology officer for TELUS. “We now have 10 percent of the television market share in our operating region. TELUS also operates enterprise IP-based communications systems stretching across Canada and internationally, and is leading the way in the development of communications technologies that fundamentally change the provision of healthcare in our country. That presents tremendous opportunities for our company, but also very real challenges. The many talented and innovative people involved with the ETC@USC bring a great pool of creative thinking to bear on these challenges, and we look forward to working with them.”
About TELUS TELUS (TSX: T) (TSX: T.A) (NYSE: TU) is a leading national telecommunications company in Canada, with $9.8 billion of annual revenue and 12.3 million customer connections including 7 million wireless subscribers, 3.7 million wireline network access lines and 1.2 million Internet subscribers and more than 300,000 TELUS TV customers. Led since 2000 by President and CEO Darren Entwistle, TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services including data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, entertainment and video.
About the Entertainment Technology Center @ USC The Entertainment Technology Center @ USC, founded in 1993 with the help of George Lucas, is a non-profit organization within USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. The ETC brings together the top entertainment, technology and consumer electronics companies to evaluate what consumers really want, which is then translated to the companies that make technology products. The ETC strives to show how technology impacts the next generation consumer, which will improve the consumer experience and will uncover new revenue streams for entertainment-related products. Along with USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, current ETC sponsors include: The Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, Inc., DTS, Lucasfilm Ltd, and TATA Consultancy Services, also Dolby, LG Electronics, MasterImage 3D, NBC Universal, RealD, Singapore IDA, Technicolor, TELUS and Thales. www.etcenter.org
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