VANCOUVER – The Canadian Association of Broadcasters inducted nine distinguished Canadians into the CAB’s Broadcast Hall of Fame at a special luncheon ceremony Monday at the CAB’s 80th Annual Convention in Vancouver.
The Hall of Fame recognizes Canadians in private broadcasting or related industries who have achieved outstanding success in helping raise industry standards from a material or humanitarian standpoint.
The inductees who were honoured at the luncheon are: Doug Allen, Broadcast engineer, Winnipeg Vicki Gabereau, Radio and Television talk show host, Vancouver Alain Gourd, Broadcast executive, Gatineau Frank Lewis, Broadcast executive, Charlottetown Gary Miles, Broadcast executive, Toronto Pierre…
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TORONTO – The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television, and Radio Artists (ACTRA) has "welcomed" the appointment of Ontario’s most senior government conciliator to mediate talks between ACTRA and producers, a release said today.
Reg Pearson, Director of the Office of Mediation with the Ontario Labour Ministry, was appointed mediator after ACTRA filed for conciliation.
ACTRA and the Canadian Film and Television Producers Association (CFTPA) and l’Association des producteurs de films et de télévision du Québec (APFTQ) had been making little progress in reaching a new Independent Production Agreement, with the two sides trading accusations of bad faith bargaining.
“He…
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MONTREAL – Part product launch, part regulatory complaint, Videotron announced the official expansion of its high definition lineup today while re-sending a message Ottawa’s way about cable regulation.
As of Saturday, Videotron’s illico digital television customers in Montreal and area will gain access to Astral Media’s HD channels: Super Écran HD, Canal D HD, Ztélé HD and Canal Vie HD. This will bring to 20 the number of channels broadcast by Videotron in high def.
"Our goal and strategy were always very clear, we want to ensure a long term vision for our programming and our broadcasting grid to…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC told Bell ExpressVu today that it can’t add XM Radio Canada or Sirius Canada to its entertainment lineup without first getting a license amendment.
Specifically, "the Commission finds that satellite subscription radio (SSR) undertakings are not programming undertakings and that the licensees of direct-to-home broadcasting distribution undertakings, in the absence of a specific condition of licence allowing such distribution, do not have authority under section 39 of the Broadcasting Distribution Regulations to distribute the programming of SSR undertakings," says the decision.
Mainly, XM and Sirius aren’t like Galaxie or MaxTrax, is what it means.
The…
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TORONTO – The CBC put out a press release Monday strongly backing up its fall programming decisions saying the launch of CBC’s fall season "so far contains definite bright spots despite significant competition from heavyweight American content."
“We ended last season with a 7.3 percent audience share and this year so far have moved that up to 7.6 percent,” said Kirstine Layfield, executive director of network programming, in the release. “Naturally, we have programs we would like to see with bigger audience numbers, but our objective this season has been to rebuild our schedule as a whole and we’re…
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MONTREAL – Today, Cogeco Cable’s Quebec HD customers have access to 11 high definition television channels, eight of which are in French, as the company added to its HD lineup.
“The growing popularity of large TV screens confirms it: our customers are constantly looking for exceptional image and sound quality when they watch television,” said Ron Perrotta, vice-president, marketing, Cogeco Cable. “We are putting all our efforts towards providing the best HD offering possible. Only two months after launching five new HD channels in Ontario, we are proud to provide our customers with the most complete French HD offering available…
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IN THE FIRST PART OF Cartt.ca’s exclusive, wide-ranging interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CEO, Robert Rabinovitch talked about stable funding, the TV Policy Review, The One, CBC radio and SRC, among other topics.
Click here to read Part I of the story from last week.
In the second part of our chat, Rabinovitch goes over on demand strategies, HD, CBC Sports (the interview was prior to Nancy Lee’s departure), local news and the residual effects of the 2005 lockout. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Let’s switch back to English TV – but actually this question…
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ST. JOHN’S – Backup systems failed after a fire at an Aliant switching station in St. John’s Nfld., on the weekend, leaving about 150,000 customers in Newfoundland without any phone service.
Reports, such as this one and this one, say the outage occurred after a fire caused a fibre cable to go down, and so far, Aliant can’t explain why their built-in redundancies failed, with a spokesperson calling it "unprecedented."
The outage lasted around five hours during the night on Friday and into Saturday morning.
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TORONTO – BBM Analytics announced Wednesday it will assume the role of official sales and marketing partner for CBC/Radio Canada’s Media Technology Monitor (MTM).
CBC/Radio-Canada’s MTM is "a comprehensive and authoritative study conducted annually that focuses on the usage of new technologies in broadcasting," says the press release. "With a national sample of over 12,000 respondents, and response rates exceeding 40%, MTM is the single largest qualitative survey available in Canada, providing reliable and accurate insights into a wide range of communication technologies."
Those include: * Market share and satisfaction with cable, satellite, wireless, and IPTV * Analogue subscribers’…
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I’VE GOT A BIT OF A SOFT spot for the CBC because when you grew up where I did, the CBC was it.
Apologies to CTV’s Northern Ontario precursor, MCTV, but when I think of old shows from my youth, it’s most often the CBC that springs to mind. Like sooo many of my fellow Canadians, when I think of the Ceeb, I invariably recall many frigid Saturday evenings inside watching Hockey Night in Canada: Me and my father sitting down with a big bowl of warm, greasy, salted popcorn. I usually fell asleep right after Peter Puck during the…
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