By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – The much-anticipated report by the federal Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review panel has so far drawn praise from some of the industries it affects, but mainly criticism from the official opposition Conservatives.
At a National Press Theatre news conference following the release of the report on Wednesday, Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservative shadow minister for industry and economic development (pictured in a cpac.ca screen cap), said that while the 235-page document, entitled Canada’s Communications Future: A Time to Act, is “well-intentioned, was written in one of the most heavily lobbied and regulated spaces in Canadian industry…
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Renamed Commission would oversee all media in Canada
By Denis Carmel
OTTAWA – Eighteen months, thousands of pages from more than 2000 written submissions, dozens of staff and six panel members have produced a shockingly thorough 235-page report which proposes 97 recommendations to change the Broadcasting Act, Telecommunications Act and Radiocommunications Act.
The CRTC will be dead, long live the CCC
One of the many recommendations from the Broadcasting & Telecommunications Legislative Review (BTLR) panel in its report called “Canada’s Communications Future: Time to Act” is a renamed CRTC where the new moniker would reflect the sweeping new regulatory powers found in many…
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GATINEAU — Canadians will have an additional week to submit their opinions on CBC/Radio-Canada’s programming as the CRTC announced Tuesday it is extending the consultation period that is part of the public broadcaster’s licence renewal process.
The Commission says it wants to hear from Canadians across the country to ensure the content produced and distributed by the public broadcaster reflects the diversity of Canada’s population, while meeting its needs in both official languages.
The deadline extension comes after the Commission posted online Tuesday a recently completed study by Cullen International which examined public broadcasters in other jurisdictions around the world….
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LONDON and MARKHAM, Ont. — Despite deeming Huawei to be a “high-risk vendor”, the British government announced it will allow the Chinese telecom company to play a limited role in building the U.K.’s 5G wireless networks.
In keeping with guidance from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the U.K. government issued a news release Tuesday outlining how high-risk vendors such as Huawei will be allowed to participate in 5G and gigabit-capable infrastructure builds in the country. “High risk vendors are those who pose greater security and resilience risks to U.K. telecoms networks,” reads the UK government release.
The…
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OTTAWA – The Department of Canadian Heritage is asking a select group of consultants to submit bids for a research contract that will do a deep dive into how the CBC impacts the country.
The contract will “assess the social, cultural and economic impacts of CBC/Radio-Canada on the Canadian media and production sectors, and on Canadian audiences more generally,” a Heritage spokesperson confirmed to Cartt.ca.
“This research is part of the department’s ongoing work to ensure our policies and programs keep pace with societal and technological changes,” the spokesperson added. “Other countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, have conducted similar…
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By Greg O’Brien
TORONTO – CBC/Radio-Canada president and CEO Catherine Tait recently asked her colleagues for a tally of what the likes of Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Apple+ and others are spending on content this year.
“The number exceeds $50 billion,” she told attendees at a Canadian Club luncheon in Toronto on Tuesday. When asked by businesswoman and Dragon Arlene Dickinson how CBC can compete with such massive content budgets, Tait responded, to some laughter in the audience (since her reply is rather self-evident), “The answer is we can not.”
“We can not compete on a dollar-for-dollar basis,” she confirmed, adding however…
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VANCOUVER — Thunderbird Entertainment said today it’s off to a record start this year, with viewership of the company’s premium content in the first two weeks of January topping 7.9 million viewers across Canada. That’s according to Numeris TV PPM data as of January 15, 2020.
The strong start to 2020 marks the highest Canadian viewership numbers in company history, according to the news release, and is attributed by Thunderbird to multiple new premieres, popular ongoing series and repeat episodes of past seasons. Thunderbird says the viewership success spans all company divisions, including kids and family (Atomic Cartoons), factual…
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OTTAWA — The CRTC is asking the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) to tell the Commission how the association and its members plan to combat the issue of unauthorized porting of mobile phone numbers, a fraudulent activity that has been reported with increasing frequency in recent months.
CBC News has reported recently on several instances where mobile phone customers reported falling victim to number porting.
“The Commission has become aware that certain Canadian mobile customers have been subject to fraudulent activity involving unauthorized porting of their mobile phone numbers,” the CRTC wrote January 15 in a letter to the…
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By Steve Faguy
MONTREAL — Quebecor is demanding the CRTC order CBC/Radio-Canada’s Tou.tv Extra paid streaming service to “cease its activities” because it goes outside the mandate of the public broadcaster and is an unfair competitor against Videotron and other regulated television service providers.
The CRTC isn’t about to go that far, but it has decided to look into whether there is an undue preference case to be made, in particular with a deal Radio-Canada has with Telus that provides Telus’s Quebec customers “exclusive” free access to the service.
Tou.tv Extra is the $7/month paid version of Tou.tv, which offers premium video…
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By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – The new year brings many challenges for Steven Guilbeault less than two months after he was sworn in as minister of Canadian Heritage, which was just a month following his debut as a federal politician, bringing the Liberals a win in Laurier-Sainte-Marie when he was elected MP for the downtown Montreal riding previously held by the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.
Co-founder of Quebec’s largest environmental organization, Équiterre, and a former campaign manager for Greenpeace, Guilbeault is tasked with managing a new ecosystem that calls on him to create new regulations for both social media platforms…
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