TORONTO — Corus Entertainment has provided an update regarding its response to the Covid-19 outbreak, while also trying to address rumours circulating regarding the company’s liquidity and compliance with its loan covenants.
In the company’s Covid-19 update, Corus president and CEO Doug Murphy says the company remains committed to delivering high-quality news and entertainment programming across multiple platforms to audiences across the country.
“The health, safety and well-being of our people is our utmost priority. We’ve focused the support efforts of our internal technology team to enable as many people as possible to work from home. For those job functions…
Continue Reading
MONTREAL – “Our teams at Cogeco across Quebec, Ontario and the U.S. East Coast are all working tirelessly to ensure our customers’ connectivity and their access to information and entertainment,” said Philippe Jetté, company president and CEO in a Friday press release.
“More than ever, access to our Internet, TV, telephony and radio broadcast services are of paramount importance for the communities that we serve, and I thank all our employees and partners for their commitment and resilience.”
All of Cogeco’s office employees transitioned to working from home over the past several days, the release explained. For employees who must work…
Continue Reading
TORONTO — With people practicing social distancing, businesses cutting hours and services, Canadians staying home to work or self-isolate while the stock markets slide in unprecedented fashion due to the effects of COVID-19, Scotiabank this week released an analysis of where it sees both negative and positive effects when it comes to the telecom and media spaces.
“Over the past week, the initial COVID-19 concerns have expanded dramatically from global device supply chain issues to an unprecedented level of domestic consumer and business disruptions. The equity sell-off in the sector has been indiscriminate,” reads the research note to investors from…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – It appears Corus Entertainment and a number of other Canadian broadcasters have made their Canadian specialty channels free to the customers of broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs) in Canada until April 30th.
The companies have not put out a press release or made an announcement saying so, but carriers such as Rogers Communications, Cogeco, Eastlink, SaskTel, Access Communications, Westman Communications and Quadro Communications have announced every one of Corus’ 28-plus channels (from Adult Swim to Food Network to History to YTV) are now free to all customers to watch while they hunker…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – CBC/Radio-Canada and the country’s TV distributors are collaborating to make the public broadcaster’s 24-hour news channels, CBC News Network and ICI RDI, more widely available so that as many people as possible can stay up to date on the news surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of Friday, CBC News Network will be available to all subscribers on Bell TV, Shaw, and Cogeco. It is also now accessible on CBC Gem, the CBC News app, and CBC.ca. There will surely be more distributors to follow this week.
UPDATE: Cogeco also added CTV News Network to the list of news channels…
Continue Reading
WHILE THERE WILL surely be more announcements in the coming days, the broadband, telecom and TV industry is responding to the COVID-19 virus in a number of ways.
All have noted in emails their networks are up to the challenge of handling whatever increased traffic that might come from thousands of people working from home rather than the office. During a conference call with financial analysts Thursday discussing its 2019 fiscal fourth quarter, Vidéotron president Jean-Francois Pruneau said, when asked he is “not worried at all about the virus impact on consumption and network capacity.”
Then, on Friday, Vidéotron said it…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA —Canada’s publicly traded television service providers lost a new record number of traditional pay-TV subscribers in 2019, continuing the trend of accelerating TV cord-cutting in Canada, according to new research from Ottawa-based research and consulting firm Boon Dog Professional Services Inc.
The continued launch of new Internet streaming services and the growth of such services in Canada, a slowdown in the growth of IPTV, and continued record losses of subscribers of cable TV all contributed to a record cumulative loss by the big Canadian TV service providers of an estimated 278,000 TV subscribers in their respective 2019 fiscal periods…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA — On Tuesday, the same day it denied an application by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) and the National Pensioners Federation (NPF) to require Koodo Mobile and other wireless service providers to provide paper bills upon request, the CRTC announced a new proceeding looking into the issue of paper billing.
In its decision against PIAC and NPF, the Commission says it found “there was no existing legislature or regulatory obligation that mandated the provision of paper bills and, since the rationale and evidence on the record of this proceeding related largely to Koodo alone, it would not…
Continue Reading
TORONTO — Independent Internet and TV service provider VMedia Inc. has submitted an objection to cabinet (officially the Governor-in-Council) in response to Bell Canada’s and the major incumbent cablecos’ petitions in November, in which they asked cabinet to overturn the CRTC’s August decision concerning final rates for aggregated wholesale high-speed access (HSA) services.
VMedia filed its submission on February 14, the last day to do so, and has posted a copy on its website. On Thursday, the independent ISP issued a news release to publicize its submission to cabinet and to explain its arguments for why the Commission’s decision…
Continue Reading
By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Lawmakers envisaged the Broadcasting Act giving the CRTC broad powers to temporarily regulate disputes between broadcasters and program providers in the public interest, including when they involve economic relationships, the federal government is arguing in court documents.
The argument hits at the heart of an appeal by Quebecor which last April pulled its TVA Sports signal from Bell TV subscribers because the company believed its channel was undervalued compared to the Bell Media’s RDS channel. The move caused the CRTC to convene an emergency hearing and forced Quebecor to redistribute the signal based on the…
Continue Reading
