EXTON, PA – Three industry veterans have been named to the electoral slate to represent Canada on the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) board of directors for 2010.
The candidates for the position of Director-At-Large Canada (representing SCTE’s Canadian members) are:
– Boris Eventov, director, digital video engineering, Cogeco Cable;– Tony Faccia, vice president, wireline access networks, Rogers Cable Communications; and– Bruce Marshall, technical director, Shaw Cablesystems.
Rogers’ Dermot O’Carroll is the current Canadian board rep. Newly elected directors will begin their two-year terms on October 19th in conjunction with the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2010 set for October 20…
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TORONTO and MONTREAL – Corus Radio is officially exiting the Quebec radio market.
The company said this morning it has reached an agreement with Cogeco Inc. for Cogeco to purchase the Corus Quebec radio stations: Montreal French (CKOI 96,9, 98,5, CKAC Sports – including CKAC’s digital licence), Montreal English (The Q 92.5), Quebec City (102,9 Souvenirs Garantis, CKOI 102,1), Gatineau (104,7 Souvenirs Garantis), Sherbrooke (107,7 Souvenirs Garantis, CKOI 104,5), Trois-Rivières (106,9 Souvenirs Garantis), St-Jérôme (CIME 103,9) for approximately $80 million. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval.
“Corus Entertainment has made the strategic decision to divest of its Corus Quebec…
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MONTREAL – Add Cogeco Cable to the list of cable companies who feel that their community TV channels are working fine as is.
At its appearance Wednesday at the CRTC community TV poilcy hearing, Cogeco offered up independent surveys by Environics Research Group and Cible Recherche that found that approximately 41% of its Ontario households watch TVCOGECO on a weekly basis, and that 90% of the people served said that they believe that the channel “provides a valuable service to the community”.
In Quebec, 57% of Cogeco’s customers watch TVCOGECO every week, a rate that is higher than the 65% observed in…
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MONTREAL – After working hard to stabilize the company’s operations in Portugal, Cogeco president and CEO Louis Audet said Thursday morning that his company is back looking for assets to buy.
“Hence, we believe the time has come for this company to start looking at reasonably priced, reasonably sized, ‘non-farm-betting type’ of acquisitions”, Audet said in a call with analysts, after releasing the company’s second quarter financial results.
Noting that such opportunities in Canada were slim, Audet said that the company would look in Europe “at markets we feel have growth potential”. While he declined to elaborate on the potential size…
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OTTAWA – CRTC audits of the community channels operated by some of Canada’s biggest cable companies show “numerous abuses”, according to the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations (CACTUS).
From 2002 through 2005 (the last year in which the CRTC monitored them), CACTUS said that the audits prove that cable companies “routinely” exceeded the maximum of two minutes per hour of promotional ads, and the 15-second limit for sponsorship messages.
Calling out Rogers in particular, CACTUS said that one of its OHL hockey programs contained 24 ads in one episode, plus another 41 ads two nights later, yet none of…
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TORONTO – Thanks to an innovative new backup system, Cogeco Data Services says that it can go green without going dark for Earth Hour.
The data communications provider said that during Earth Hour on March 27 from 8:30 pm – 9:30 pm, it will disconnect from the electrical grid and generate its own clean power using its natural gas generator. The generator will power its entire co-location facility using clean burning natural gas, which in turn will reduce the company’s electrical consumption within the City of Toronto by up to 447 KW – the equivalent of powering down 71 residential homes…
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MONTREAL – Cogeco Cable introduced a new high speed Internet package to its customers in the Burlington, Oakville, Milton and Halton areas of Ontario on Tuesday.
Called ‘Ultimate 30’, the new package is powered by DOCSIS 3.0 technology, allowing Cogeco’s residential customers access to speeds of up to 30 Mbps for downloads and up to 1.5 Mbps for uploads, with a monthly download cap of 125 GB.
Compared to competitors in its footprint, Cogeco said that its Ultimate 30 package offers the fastest download speed at the most affordable price available today.
“With this addition, our Internet services offer customers more flexibility and…
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TORONTO – With the advantage of hindsight, Cogeco Cable and vendor Arris Group shared some lessons from their DOCSIS 3.0 implementations with attendees during a session Wednesday at the SCTE Canadian Summit.
According to Steven Krapp, Arris’ director of product management, some of those key considerations are related to spectrum, output power, noise funnelling and combining loss.
Krapp’s first recommendation is that organizations use downstream channel bonding – available as 4-channel bonding today, but 8-, 16- and 24-channel bonding capabilities are on the product horizon, he said.
One advantage to DOCSIS 3.0 channel bonding is that dynamic load…
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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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