The CRTC will decide how much it will cost Bell and Quebecor to broadcast each other’s sports channels, it said this month.
The two companies agreed that they could not hash out commercial terms to distribute Bell’s RDS and Videotron’s TVA Sports and filed in November a request for the regulator to make that decision.
The commission agreed in a letter dated May 15, saying the request met all the required criteria for a final offer arbitration hearing: the dispute is shared between the two; it concerns only monetary issues; the parties exhausted all methods to come to an agreement; the…
Continue Reading
Aboriginal Peoples Television Network Incorporated (APTN) has been given the green light from the CRTC to launch a new APTN Indigenous-language channel.
The CRTC on Tuesday approved a June 2023 application by APTN to amend its conditions of service so that its four distinct programming feeds — APTN West, APTN East, APTN North and the national APTN HD feed — could be consolidated into two high-definition channels — APTN and APTN Languages.
As a result of the CRTC’s decision, the APTN channel will soon operate on a unified broadcast schedule featuring programming in…
Continue Reading
By Ahmad Hathout
TVA Group will be able to broadcast fewer newscasts and hours of local programming to allow it to be nimbler in a rough financial environment, the CRTC ruled Monday.
TVA parent company Quebecor a year ago filed to the CRTC the request to ease the regulatory obligations on CFCM-DT in Quebec City, saying it would need some relief from the need to broadcast two newscasts every weekend and reduce by two hours the requirement to maintain 18 hours of local programming per week. The alternative to that, it warned, is that it would have to make “difficult…
Continue Reading
By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC has on Monday finally decided to ease Corus’s financial obligations and delay the payback period to certain Canadian content funds, more than six months after it requested said relief.
That means Corus will see its obligations to programs of national interest (PNI) reduced from 8.5 per cent of previous year’s revenues to 5 per cent and extend beyond the current licence term the repayment period of certain amounts owed to its Canadian programming expenditure (CPE) that were deferred from the pandemic.
“The evidence on the record of this proceeding demonstrates that Corus is under considerable financial strain,”…
Continue Reading
Canadian Heritage announced via X on Thursday that Claire Anderson has been reappointed as CRTC commissioner for British Columbia and Yukon for a second five-year term.
The official order in council dated May 3 says her reappointment is effective Aug. 26, 2024.
A citizen of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation and based in Whitehorse, Anderson is the first Indigenous woman and first Yukon resident to be appointed as a CRTC commissioner. Her original appointment started in August 2019.
Called to the Yukon bar in 2014, Anderson started…
Continue Reading
By Ahmad Hathout
Telus said the CRTC must pony up if it requires the telco to build a new network to keep landline customers in certain remote communities of British Columbia connected – even though there are alternative service providers in those areas.
Earlier this year, the Vancouver-based company was forced by the CRTC to explain what was going on with home telephone services in those BC communities after it proposed to disconnect the services. Telus explained that those services are based on decades-old wireless technology known as the SR500 system that uses the 3.5 GHz spectrum, which…
Continue Reading
Regulator says it is aiming for wholesale internet decision by end of summer
By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC said Friday it will not immediately decide whether the three largest telecommunications companies should be banned from accessing the large telcos’ bundled middle- and last-mile fibre facilities, effectively greenlighting Bell, Rogers, and Telus to ride on those networks in the interim.
A consortium made up of Bell, Cogeco, Eastlink, TekSavvy, and the indie rep the Competitive Network Operators of Canada filed a late March request for the CRTC to rule that the Big 3 are banned from accessing Bell’s and Telus’s fibre facilities…
Continue Reading
By Doug Barrett, adjunct professor in the Arts, Media & Entertainment MBA program at the Schulich School of Business
This is the third piece examining the current debate on the definition of Canadian content.
In the first I examined the different legal foundations of the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office (CAVCO) system and the CRTC system
In the second I argued that the CRTC should require CAVCO certification for all programs benefiting from “public purpose” money available because of CRTC regulation or other subsidies.
In this piece I look at the appropriate role of the CRTC content certification…
Continue Reading
The Municipalité régionale de comté (MRC) de D’Autray, located in the Lanaudière region northeast of Montreal, has submitted a Part 1 application asking the CRTC to clarify the rules regarding costs related to preparatory work on Bell poles to which the regional county municipality wants to attach.
In an application dated April 18 and posted to the CRTC’s website Tuesday, the MRC’s director of information systems and telecom services asks the commission to facilitate and to encourage Bell’s application of the provisions of the CRTC’s February 2023 telecom regulatory policy regarding costs associated with make-ready work…
Continue Reading
By Ahmad Hathout
An independent telecommunications association is asking that the CRTC to raise the revenue threshold for companies required to contribute annual fees to the commission, after the regulator ruled similarly for broadcasters last month.
The Independent Telecommunications Providers Association filed a Part 1 application made public this week imploring the regulator to this year increase the revenue threshold from $10 million to $25 million of previous year’s financial results – money that goes toward CRTC operations and a regime that funds telecommunications services.
“Today, the application of the $10 million mandates contribution payments by…
Continue Reading
