TORONTO – Although they were hard pressed to admit it, cable operators at Wednesday’s SCTE Canadian Summit acknowledged that customer complaints to their call centres are often the best measurement of the quality of digital service being provided by their networks.
It isn’t that these cable ops are lacking network monitoring platforms, or don’t use the resultant diagnostic data to address problems detected by those tools. The bigger issue is that many of the existing measurement and diagnostic tools on the market tell only part of the story, said the speakers who took part in a panel discussion on digital quality issues.
Michel Lapointe, senior…
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MONTREAL – Perhaps due in part to some public pressure, Cogeco Cable has signed on to offer the video-on-demand coverage of the Olympics offered by the Games’ Broadcast Media Consortium.
Cogeco joins Rogers Cable, Shaw Cable, EastLink and its subsidiary Delta Cable and Source Cable in offering the 700 hours of VOD content free of charge beginning February 13 with the Opening Ceremony.
All coverage will be available within 24 hours after its original airing to Cogeco’s digital cable customers in Québec and Ontario that have access to VOD on channel 600.
A Cogeco spokesperson wrote in an email to Cartt.ca that…
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EXTON, PA – Cogeco Cable’s Erik Jenson is one of seven SCTE members to be awarded a grant from the organization for professional development.
The fourth quarter’s SCTE Foundation grants are earmarked for such professional development purposes as SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2009, Jones/NCTI courses, a bachelor’s degree program, and an industry certification program.
The other grant recipients are:– Robert Dignum of Yelm, WA;– Lowell Flanner, Sunflower Broadband;– Gary Paulson, Comcast Cable;– Brent Sager, Broadband Solutions;– David Stuart, in-transition member;– Amelia Urban, Jones/NCTI.
The SCTE Foundation was established by the SCTE Board of Directors in 2005 and…
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TORONTO – Cogeco Data Services has joined forces with the Alpha Group on a new managed network infrastructure called Secure Consolidated Network Infrastructure (SCNI).
SCNI will provide customers with a fully managed connectivity solution supporting sub-millisecond access to Canadian equity markets.
Alpha said that it is providing the new SCNI network to increase trading frequency, decrease costs and simplify network connection requirements for customers accessing the Canadian equity markets and related services. The network will use a fully managed, dedicated fibre ring utilizing wavelength division multiplexing based transport technology.
www.cogecodata.comwww.alphatradingsystems.ca
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OTTAWA – You can’t sell what isn’t yours.
That, in a nutshell, is what some of the interveners into Mediadenovo’s application for a broadcast license have said about the company’s plans to sell the local availability advertising time on American specialty services to national Canadian advertisers. The concept will face the commissioners in a non-appearing hearing on February 22. Comments closed Wednesday. (A prior version of this story suggested this would be a traditional public hearing. At this time, that is not the plan.)
In 2009 Mediadenovo, a re-branded Only Imagine (which had a similar submission shot down by the CRTC in…
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TORONTO – Cable viewers can watch many of their favourite Olympic moments over and over again, on demand thanks to a video on demand agreement signed with four cable operators.
More than 700 hours of video on demand coverage in English and French of the 2010 Winter Games will be available via Rogers Cable, Shaw Cable, EastLink and its subsidiary Delta Cable and Source Cable, free of charge. This represents more than triple the amount of on demand coverage of Turin 2006 (221 hours).
(Ed note: As a Cogeco Cable customer and Olympics fan, we here at Cartt.ca are very hopeful…
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HAMILTON MEDIA OUTLETS aired a city-wide telethon yesterday to raise money for two hospitals in Haiti which have long-standing working relationships with Hamilton’s St. Joseph’s Health System.
According to the most up-to-date reports, Hopital Universitaire la Paix – a 150 bed hospital – is standing, but is overwhelmed with patients and is suffering a critical lack of supplies. Approximately 50% of University Hospital – a 750 bed hospital in downtown Port-Au-Prince – has been destroyed and it too is experiencing the same demands from those affected by the earthquake.
Channel Zero’s CHCH, The Hamilton Spectator, Corus-owned 900 CHML and cable community…
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TORONTO – Cogeco Cable’s Chris Macfarlane, Telonix’s Eric Goulden and Jason Lowe of Clearcable are the three newest additions to the board of directors of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers Ontario chapter.
They were the top three candidates after chapter members’ recent vote.
They join TVC Canada’s Bill McMillan, Rogers Cable’s James Myles, and Cogeco’s Daniel Sacolle on the board of directors and will assume their roles starting February 1,2010.
Boris Eventov (Cogeco), Rob McCann (Clearcable) and Bruce Marshall (Mountain Cablevision/Shaw) will be retiring from the board, after having served their term.
www.scte-ontario.com
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TORONTO – The primary headline will be the $40 million raised by Canada’s broadcasters via a pair of telethons on Friday (one in Toronto and another in French in Montreal), but there are a lot of other stories out there of companies from our industry rallying their employees or their customers to the cause.
Canada For Haiti, Friday’s one-hour, commercial-free special produced collaboratively between CBC Television, CTV and Global Television and also aired on Citytv, has raised more than $13.5 million to date for relief efforts in Haiti, it was confirmed today. (Citytv also aired its own “Help for Haiti”…
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HALIFAX – Just three months after his departure from EastLink, Dan McKeen’s career will continue in the same East Coast city in which it began.
The former co-CEO at Bragg Communications-owned EastLink was recently named senior vice-president of customer solutions at Bell Aliant. He left EastLink October 27, 2009 and begins his new job next Thursday.
In an interview with Cartt.ca, McKeen (who spent 24 years first at Halifax Cable, right out of university, which later was purchased by Bragg) is happy to be staying put, while looking forward to moving on. “This lets me work in the industry…
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