TORONTO – Hollywood Suite is marking its 5th birthday with a five-week national free preview promising more than 500 movies.
Just in time for the holidays, viewers can enjoy the gift of the best movies from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, uncut and commercial-free, on four HDTV channels and On Demand. December titles include the director’s cut of Bad Santa, plus films like 12 Years a Slave, Titanic, The Expendables, The Interview, Raising Arizona, 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Fatal Attraction, American Beauty, Jerry Maguire, and Moneyball.
The freeview is available now through January 5, 2107…
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MONTREAL – Cogeco Connexion also unveiled its new television packaging Wednesday, with channels now available either individually or in small theme packages.
Its entry-level package Basic Channels, priced at $25 per month, also includes affiliates of the major American networks and is a prerequisite for other packages or individual channels.
Customers may also create their own My Mix packages of 10, 20, 30 or 40 channels in Ontario, or 10, 15, 20 or 30 channels in Québec, or opt for the ready-made Perfect Mix ($68 per month, with a six month promotional price of $35) or the Ultimate Mix for $95…
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TORONTO — Since launching five years ago with 11 full-time employees, under the leadership of Canadian TV industry veterans Jay Switzer and David Kines, commercial-free movie service Hollywood Suite has slowly but surely been growing.
After rejigging its original studio-focused channels a year ago and rebranding them as a quartet of decades-focused channels in anticipation of the rollout of the pick-and-pay regime, company executives believe the company is well positioned for the new market reality of a la carte TV channel choice.
Despite continuing to be small in stature, now employing 14, Hollywood Suite’s success shouldn’t come as too…
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OTTAWA – The Wireless Code plus customer service improvements by the country’s wireless and Internet providers helped to cut telecom service complaints for a third straight year, the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS) said Thursday in its annual report.
The report, Guidance In A Sea Of Change, showed that the CCTS received 8,197 customer complaints in 2015-16, down 18% from 9,988 in 2014-15, and that it increased its resolution rate two points to 89%. Wireless services complaints once again topped the list with 50.3% of all complaints, followed by 26.5% for Internet, 19.6% for local telephone service and 3.6%…
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MONTREAL – Cogeco Connexion launched Gigabit Internet service to customers in Oakville and Burlington, Ontario on Wednesday.
UltraFibre 1Gig service will roll out in successive phases with deployment in Quebec slated for the spring of 2017. According to the company’s website, pricing starts at $148.95 per month for residential customers and $179.95 per month for business customers.
Cogeco Connexion said it is launching this service to prepare for the ultra-connected homes and businesses of the future, utilizing its hybrid network consisting of coaxial cable (HFC) and 11,000 km of linear fibre running from Windsor, Ontario to Gaspé in Québec.
“With online entertainment…
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OTTAWA – Canadians continued to cut the TV cord in record (if still pretty small) numbers since launch of a CRTC-mandated skinny basic TV package on March 1st.
In the two fiscal quarters since phase one of the Commission’s new consumer choice policy came into effect (which mandated a $25 skinny basic package of over-the-air stations and must-carry channels and the launch of smaller, theme packs of channels), Canada’s publicly traded TV service providers combined lost approximately 98,500 TV subscribers, according to new research and analysis from Ottawa-based research and consulting firm Boon Dog Professional Services.
That’s a loss of 11,500…
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TORONTO – Food lovers may gorge on Bell Media’s Gusto over the holiday season thanks to a national free preview of the food and lifestyle channel.
The exclusive home to all-new Jamie Oliver programming in Canada, programming also features cooking series from lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, including the new Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party where she cooks and entertains alongside her unlikely friend and King of Kush, Snoop Dogg. Gusto’s lineup also includes superstar British chef Lorraine Pascale in her new series Lorraine’s Fast, Fresh And Easy Food, the perfectly paired exclusive series The Wine Show, plus hours of original Canadian programming,…
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GATINEAU – Differential pricing can benefit a broad range of players in the communications market, Telus told the CRTC on the fourth day of its DPP hearing, but just don’t let the vertically integrated (VI) entities use their “unnatural incentives” to give themselves an advantage.
“Since differential pricing practices increase the size of the market, they allow both carriers and content providers to spread these fixed costs over a larger number of consumers. This process has produced, and should continue to produce, newer and better services at stable or falling prices throughout the Internet ecosystem,” said Dr. Jeffrey Eisenach, managing…
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MONTREAL – For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016, revenue at Cogeco Inc. increased by $18 million, or 3.2%, to reach $572 million driven by growth in the communications segment mainly through the improvement of its American broadband services operations, the company said in a press release announcing its Q4 and fiscal 2016 year-end results.
Adjusted EBITDA increased by 5.6% to reach $258.3 million compared to the same period of fiscal 2015 mainly as a result of the improvement in the Communications segment and profit for the period amounted to $80.7 million, compared to profit for the period of…
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GATINEAU – Smaller broadcasters warned the CRTC on Wednesday that it must guard against differential pricing practices because they could have a significant negative impact on their content.
The Independent Broadcast Group told the Commission Wednesday morning it has to consider potential abuses from media companies which own both content and ISPs.
Brad Danks, CEO at OUTtv, noted in his opening remarks to the IBG’s appearance in the DPP hearing that it’s pretty clear that vertically integrated (VI) media companies are able to prefer their own content in ISP distribution. In addition, once the VI’s affiliated broadcast distribution arm gets ISP…
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