TORONTO – The Federal Court dismissed Bell Canada’s appeal of a CRTC decision over its former mobile TV service offering.
According to a report in the Globe and Mail, the three judge panel came down on the side of the CRTC and ruled it had the jurisdiction to make the ruling it did against the mobile TV service.
The CRTC had ruled Bell violated the Telecommunications Act by giving undue preference to its Bell Mobile TV subscribers when it exempted the mobile TV service from the data caps generally applied to customers of its wireless services. Bell appealed on the grounds that it was broadcasting and therefore not subject to the Telecom Act, as we reported here during our coverage of the case in January.
The CRTC ruled against Bell in January 2015 (as well as Videotron, but that company altered its service after the decision) after grad student Ben Klass filed a complaint in November 2013 over how Bell was marketing the service, which offered some of Bell’s own video content to customers for $5/month and up to 10 hours of the video usage didn’t count against customer data caps while all other video content did.
