OTTAWA – The CRTC has turned down CBC’s request to amend the broadcast licence of its specialty channel bold, instead giving it a month to come up with another programming strategy.
As Cartt.ca has reported, CBC re-launched its Country Canada category 1 specialty channel as bold on March 27 2008, after telling the CRTC that the change could be done without amending its original nature of service. But the Commission disagreed, and scheduled a hearing to determine whether the way that CBC re-branded the channel had negatively impacted “the integrity of the licensing process”. The CRTC eventually suspended the…
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TORONTO – The majority of Canadians feel that Canadian Content rules should be relaxed, according to a new Ipsos Reid poll.
In ‘The Canadian-Content Conundrum’ survey, 53% of the 1,024 adults polled said that they closely agreed with the sentiment that ‘we should stop worrying about and imposing Canadian content rules on the TV industry because we know what our identity is and we should just care about and value creating good entertainment that anyone will tune into, and if it happens to be Canadian in content and/or production, all the better’. This was particularly true amongst those living…
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TORONTO – Score Media will partner with CBC on their coverage of 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa this June.
While the deal excludes live games, The Score can air “extended highlights” of each match plus create additional content such as features and behind-the-scenes coverage of participating teams.
“As a licensed broadcaster, we’re thrilled to have access to extended highlights of every 2010 FIFA World Cup match, along with exclusive access and behind-the-scenes footage from every team as they compete in South Africa,” said Benjie Levy, Score Media’s EVP and COO, in a statement. “We have a strong soccer…
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TORONTO – The North American Broadcaster Association (NABA) has elected Leonard Ramos to serve a second term as its president, while Michael Starling and Robert Winteringham were named as vice presidents.
Ramos, a longstanding member of the NABA board of directors and executive, is Grupo Televisa’s director of high technology projects. Starling is executive director and CTO of National Public Radio Labs, and Winteringham is deputy general counsel for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
NABA also elected the following members to its board of directors at its annual general meeting in New York City:
– Dany Harrison, General Manger, Technical Production, CBC/Radio Canada;-…
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AS OF YESTERDAY, there were 17 months left for Canada to make the transition from analog over-the-air TV broadcasting to digital. Given the lack of action so far, hitting the August 31, 2011 deadline for the shut off of analog TV is now nearly impossible.
Everyone in and around the industry knows it. Everyone. It was openly talked about during the two CRTC hearings in the fall. It was as if the deadline meant nothing. But few want to acknowledge the industry’s and the federal government’s failure to act. In fact, as you’ll read, the federal government still hasn’t even…
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OTTAWA – The CBC is taking a ‘wait and see’ approach to the new Canada Media Fund.
In a statement released shortly after the CMF’s guidelines were unveiled on Friday, the network called the rules “a source of considerable concern for CBC/Radio-Canada”.
While initially optimistic when the new funding agency was announced last year, particularly its aim to inject money in the production of original prime-time programming, the public broadcaster said that it now “appears that less money will be invested in television production this year and that many independent producers will not have access to funding for their projects”.
“For the…
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OTTAWA – The broadcasting industry is opposing a plan by Industry Canada to allow fixed and mobile services – in addition to broadcasting – in portions of the L-band. Aerospace players say they want a piece of the band as well to accommodate testing of aeronautical mobile telemetry (AMT).
The L-band is divided into three sub-segments: 1435-1452 MHz is used for subscriber radio systems (SRS); 1452-1492 MHz is allocated to digital audio broadcasting (DAB) and has some SRS services; and the 1492-1525 MHz has an SRS and mobile satellite services allocation. This upper part of the band is the least used.
The…
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TORONTO – With almost three months to go before the first match, CBC has announced that it will pull out all the stops during its coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa.
From June 11 through July 11, CBC Television, Radio-Canada Télévision, CBC’s digital channel bold, CBCSports.ca and Radio-Canada.ca will broadcast more than 1000 total combined hours of the 64-game tournament in English and French.
All matches will be streamed live and on-demand on Radio-Canada.ca/FIFA (launching in May) and CBCSports.ca/fifaworldcup, the pub ‘caster announced Wednesday. Both sites will also offer live in-game chats, video highlights, feature stories and blogs…
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OTTAWA – The CBC was specifically denied inclusion into the value for signal club on Monday by the CRTC.
The Broadcasting Act specifically says the CBC has to be made available to the largest number of Canadians possible. But, the new value-for-signal regime would let broadcasters pull their signals in a contract dispute.
Those two ideas don’t go together, said the Commission.
“(T)he Commission notes that section 3(1)(m)(vii) of the Act states that the programming provided by the CBC should ‘be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means and as resources become available for the purpose,’” says the…
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GATINEAU – Canadian content exhibition requirement for over-the-air broadcasters were lowered to 55% from 60%, and the broadcasters seem to have been given a break on spending requirements, according to the CRTC decision from proceeding 2009-411 released today.
Under the CRTC’s new group-based TV regulatory policy, the CRTC will now require Canada’s three largest English-language networks to spend at least 30% of their gross overall revenues on Canadian programming.
CTVglobemedia, Canwest, and Rogers will also be given a specific spending requirement for their OTA networks during licence renewals, but will have the flexibility to shift some of their expenditures to their specialty channels….
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