OTTAWA – While most witnesses have insisted the Broadcasting Act is woefully out of date and the sky is falling on the industry, the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications reviewing that piece of legislation as well as the Telecommunications Act heard last week the Broadcasting Act actually works just fine, and the broadcasting system is relatively healthy.
On Wednesday, October 17, Marc Raboy, Beaverbrook professor emeritus in ethics, media and communications at McGill University and Gregory Taylor, assistant professor at the department of communication, media and film, University of Calgary, told a far different story than the appointed politicians…
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YOU HAVE TO SYMPATHIZE with the folks who took the time to register their frustration with Canadian telcos and cellcos by filing an intervention to the CRTC’s latest hearing which begins Monday.
They feel lied to. They believe they were told one thing and sold another. That they were never informed how the price they agreed to was just a promotion which ends in six months. That they told sales reps the products and services they wanted and then had other things added onto their bills. That they ended up on a contract they didn’t want.
Having read through quite a…
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TORONTO – A number of Canada’s commercial television broadcasters are banding together to end a practice known as gross-net invoicing by the end of next year.
Instead, they will implement net billing in an effort to improve TV trading, says an announcement by marketing and research association thinktv.
thinktv president and CEO Catherine MacLeod said that its member companies, which include Bell Media, CBC/Radio-Canada, IndieNet, Corus Entertainment, Quebecor Media Group, and Rogers Media, were fully aligned on the initiative, adding that “thinktv works to help advertisers and agencies get the best out of television on all its platforms – and…
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CANNES – How small media players can survive and thrive against Netflix or Amazon has occupied minds this week at MIPCOM, the annual TV market in the south of France.
So when veteran TV showrunner Tassie Cameron was asked Tuesday during a panel of Canadian content creators in Cannes how she competed against U.S. streaming giant, she recalled a postcard she received a few years ago.
On the card was a cartoon featuring a big fish, a small fish and a giant net surrounding them. Cameron then recalled the caption: "Either get so big you bust through the motherf*cker, or stay…
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CANNES – Newly-installed CBC/Radio Canada chief Catherine Tait by now has gotten used to people congratulating her on being the first woman to run the public broadcaster.
"But most importantly, I'm the first producer to run the CBC," a fact underlined this week as Tait attends the MIPCOM TV conference in Cannes, where she sat down with Cartt.ca for an interview.
Walking up and down the Croisette and around the bunker-like Palais des Festivals is meant to signal the CBC is open for business as it looks internationally for content and commercial opportunities, Tait said Sunday. She argued the CBC or…
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OTTAWA – The program put together by the organizers of this year’s International Institute of Communications Canadian Chapter conference should attract a good crowd this Halloween.
Scheduled for October 31st and November 1st at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa, the annual policy and legal gathering looks to take a deep dive into the federal government’s Broadcast and Telecom Legislative Review – and will feature the first public appearance of the expert panel examining the Broadcasting, Telecom and Radiocommunication Acts.
All seven members of the panel, announced in June, will close the two-day event on November 1st in…
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ON MONDAY, WE described a Federal Court of Appeal decision as one that strikes down the CRTC’s TV Wholesale Code.
Bell Canada had appealed the Code to the Court, saying the way it was implemented fell outside the CRTC’s jurisdiction – and in its decision released Monday the Court agreed with Bell, saying the Commission had no authority under section 9(1)(h) of the Broadcasting Act to meddle in private carriage contracts the way the Wholesale Code mandates.
The decision seemed to us to be the end of that Code – and we were bolstered in that…
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Better to leave it to various Acts review
GATINEAU – The CRTC announced this morning it has dismissed a proposed website-blocking regime which would address copyright piracy, dubbed FairPlay Canada by its backers.
The Commission ruled it does not have the jurisdiction under the Telecommunications Act and so it did not consider the merits of the proposal, saying in a release this is best considered under the Copyright Act, over which it has no jurisdiction.
The Copyright Act, is under review, on which Cartt.ca has been reporting on Continue Reading
GATINEAU – If Iristel wants to make sure hospitals can reach patients who are also its customers on the phone in order to call them in for surgery, then the company should stop illegally boosting network traffic so those calls make it through, Telus told the CRTC in a letter today (September 28).
This week, the CBC posted a story detailing how a hospital could not reach a cancer patient in Behchoko, NWT (about 100 kms northwest of Yellowknife) in order to call her in for surgery. She is an Ice Wireless customer – which is a…
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AS THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE of Canada’s fastest-growing telecommunications company, I understand corporations operate to make a profit. Profits build shareholder value and create jobs.
And in competitive environments, corporations will battle. I get that. My company is currently entangled in a heated dispute with Telus Corp. in Canada’s North. Of course, we think we’re right and Telus thinks something else. Lawyers are involved. The regulator is involved. Even politicians are beginning to take notice.
The problem is that innocent Canadians are involved, too.
And this week, I received a phone call from a CBC reporter that underlined that…
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