OTTAWA – The CRTC has suspended its public hearing into CBC’s re-branding of its specialty channel ‘Country Canada’ to ‘bold’, after the public broadcaster acknowledged that bold’s programming may, in fact, be inconsistent with its nature of service condition of licence.
The hearing, scheduled for June 2, was to determine whether the way that CBC re-branded the channel had negatively impacted “the integrity of the licensing process”. CBC re-launched its category 1 specialty Country Canada as bold on March 27 2008, after telling the Commission that the change could be done without amending the nature of service of Country…
Continue Reading
Don’t miss your chance to register for the 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit, only a few weeks away.
Held June 15 – 17 in Toronto, the event promises to cover all segments of the Canadian telecommunications and IT industries, and bring together leaders from all constituencies – service providers, manufacturers, applications providers, policy makers and regulators.
Some of the confirmed participants to date are Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of Research In Motion, Nadir Mohamed, president and CEO of Rogers Communications, CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein, and Richard Stursberg, executive vice president of English Services for CBC.
Sessions include social networking; new…
Continue Reading
ONE OF THE FORMER rules of thumb when it comes to opinionating was: Never Use “I”.
Saying “I think” or “I believe” in a column is redundant and lazy. To paraphrase what more than one editor has said in my presence over the years: “Readers already know it’s what you think, your name’s at the top of the piece. Be more creative in how you write.”
So, with apologies to all of my former bosses, I must say: I have a headache. I’ve grown just a little weary of thinking about the so-called crisis in conventional television. And judging…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – Mark McKinney will be awarded with the CTV Sir Peter Ustinov Award at the Banff World Television Awards on June 8.
The comedian, actor, writer and producer will join a list of prominent comedic actors who have received this award in the past, including Brent Butt, Guy A. Lepage, Barry Humphries (a.k.a. Dame Edna), John Cleese, Bob Newhart, Martin Short, Tracy Ullman, Kelsey Grammer and Rick Mercer.
“Beginning with the comedy troupe Kids in the Hall, Mark McKinney’s original characters and unconventional sketches have become a part of pop culture,” said Peter Vamos, executive director of the Banff Festival, in…
Continue Reading
WINNIPEG – Aboriginal broadcaster APTN will unveil its new look, format, and host team during its evening newscast next Monday, on May 25, 2009.
Under the tagline News that not only informs, but inspires, APTN National News will roll out a new on-air intro and its new studio featuring “a sleek, floor-to-ceiling layered design with background colours to match the recently implemented APTN on-air colours”, the press release detailed.
The move is part of the network’s re-brand and new on-air look that began in February.
Patrice Mousseau will join host Todd Lamirande on the news desk beginning next week….
Continue Reading
WITH THE ENTIRE TV industry in turmoil, all of us supposedly pondering structural reform while audience fragmentation proliferates as the economy sputters and advertising budgets shrivel, everyone is wondering what Canadian television should look like in the 21st century.
(Ed Note: We first ran the following piece on March 16th and now that the OTA license renewal hearing is complete – and having been disappointed by the dearth of new ideas over those many, many days – we decided to take a page out of the OTA business model and rerun it. To us, this is the type of dramatic re-thinking of the…
Continue Reading
GATINEAU – Canadian convention broadcasters have had their licenses renewed for a year, won’t face a one-to-one foreign-Canadian programming spend requirement – and will have a LOT of regulatory work to do in the next 12 months,
As first reported by Cartt.ca this week, the CRTC announced its preliminary decisions on a few matters from the public hearing to renew the licences of most of Canada’s private conventional television broadcasters.
“We are making our initial determinations public to provide a measure of guidance to conventional broadcasters as they prepare for the upcoming broadcast year and embark on program purchases,”…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein is pushing CTVglobemedia and the CBC to reach an agreement allowing the CBC to broadcast the 2010 Olympics on its French-language television service.
During an address to the Standing Committee on Official Languages in Ottawa on Tuesday, von Finckenstein said that while the CTV/Rogers Olympic broadcast media consortium intends to make French broadcasters TQS, RDS and RIS available free of charge to cable companies offering digital TV in markets with an English-speaking majority, this will still leave some francophones who rely on over-the-air television signals, or who subscribe to analog cable, without…
Continue Reading
GATINEAU – Final replies by broadcasters to the many, many, many things which were uttered over two-and-a-half weeks of the conventional TV license renewal hearing were due into the Commission Wednesday and to no one’s surprise, no minds have been changed.
We’ve been told by two sources with knowledge of the timing that the Commission will issue a decision on its 1:1 idea on Friday (tomorrow) – just as Canada’s broadcasters are headed to Los Angeles to buy American programming for next fall’s TV schedule.
One of the key “broader policy” questions the Regulator put to the industry was…
Continue Reading
WINNIPEG – MTS Allstream threw its support behind ‘Rise Again 2009: The Red Cross Manitoba Flood Relief Concert’ in aid of Manitoba’s 2009 flood victims.
The fundraising concert was held Wednesday night at the MTS Centre in Winnipeg, featuring Canadian performers Tom Jackson, Deborah Cox, Tom Cochrane, and The Barra MacNiels, among others. The concert was broadcast live on CBC Radio, and will air on APTN on May 17 and 18, and on CBC TV on May 18.
MTS Allstream designed and built the Rise Again 2009 web site www.mymanitoba.com/flood, and provided FleetNet radios, cell phones, and corporate fleet vehicles…
Continue Reading
