WATERTOWN, N.Y. – Long-time Canadian broadcasting executive (and Cartt.ca correspondent) Bill Roberts has joined the board of directors at U.S. local public broadcaster WPBS-TV, which serves Northern New York State as well as Ontario’s National Capital Region.
Roberts is the former president and CEO of Vision TV, and has served as the secretary general of the North American Broadcasters’ Association, is co-founder of Public Broadcasters International, and past senior vice-president of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. In addition, he has served as a board member of the Banff Television Festival, as an international director with the National Academy of Television…
Continue Reading
Family discounts and easier device payment plans launch, too
VANCOUVER – The day after its three-week, $75/month with no overage charges wireless promotion officially ended, Telus has decided to make the lower price permanent – and to add some new wrinkles.
Today, the company launched what it’s calling “Peace of Mind” rate plans, which begin at $75/month for 10GB of high speed data with any overage delivered at 512 Kbps. There are also plans at $95 for 20GB and $125 for 50GB. Speeds are slowed for users who cross their limits in those plans, too. While Rogers – when it Continue Reading
COO Mirko Bibic to take over
MONTREAL – Bell Canada today announced president and CEO George Cope will retire as of January 5, 2020 and will be replaced in the role by company COO Mirko Bibic.
“The BCE board is pleased to take the next step in our succession plan by confirming Mirko Bibic as our next CEO,” said Gordon Nixon, chair of BCE and Bell Canada, in the company press release. Bibic will be the company’s 14th CEO, dating back to the company’s founding in 1880.
“Mirko is a seasoned Bell executive who has played a critical leadership role in the…
Continue Reading
NEW ROSS, NS – The federal government unveiled Canada’s first rural economic development strategy Thursday that, among other priorities, seeks to boost reliable and affordable high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity.
Rural Opportunity, National Prosperity: An Economic Development Strategy for Rural Canada notes that as of 2018, only 37% of rural households are currently able to access the CRTC’s target high-speed Internet speeds of 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload, compared to 97% of households in urban areas, and that 14% of major Canadian roads and highways still lacked mobile wireless coverage.
Minister of Rural Economic Development Bernadette Jordan also…
Continue Reading
Heritage Minister offers an enlightening tweet
OTTAWA – They heard directly from from 150 stakeholders and read through more than 2,000 interventions and today the Broadcast an Telecom Legislative Review panel released their summary of all of that.
It’s not too exhaustive, nor does it tie any points of view back to specific stakeholders (that can be found in the individual submissions which are all now online) but the report highlights the areas of tension identified in their consultations – and really, the same tensions fought over in the industry for…
Continue Reading
BTLR panel wades through 2,085 submissions
OTTAWA – The federal government’s Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review (BTLR) made public its preliminary report today, a summary of what it heard from more than 2,000 written submissions and a dozen conferences spread out over the past 10 months.
Its What We Heard Report, released today along with all of those written submissions (see links below), reflects the panel’s “extensive outreach and engagement process to hear what Canadians had to say about updating the existing laws to reflect the realities of our rapidly evolving digital world,” says the announcement.
In September 2018, the panel launched an…
Continue Reading
GATINEAU – Jilted 9(1)(h) license applicant ICTV has filed a petition to the Governor-in-Council demanding federal Cabinet not only set aside the CRTC decision granting Rogers Media a must-carry TV license for OMNI, but also that CRTC chair Ian Scott and vice-chair broadcasting Caroline Simard, be fired.
It has also filed a motion for leave to appeal the same CRTC decision to the Federal Court of Appeal.
In the petition to the GIC filed late Monday, Independent Community Television Montreal, an independent, not-for-profit community TV operation out of Montreal (which was one of the applicants hoping to…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – In another chapter of the ongoing saga between Bell and Quebecor, the CRTC has directed Bell to continue providing roaming services to Vidéotron, at least for now.
A Part 1 application from Québecor Média on behalf of its Vidéotron subsidiary to the Commission earlier this month said that Vidéotron’s end-users have had access to Bell’s roaming service since May 2015, but that Bell had threatened to suspend that service after alleging that “ a significant number of Vidéotron’s users …were using Bell Mobility’s roaming service …on an illegitimate, non-occasional and permanent basis” which it said contravened Bell Mobility’s…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – Corriere Canadese has formally appealed to federal Cabinet the CRTC decision to grant a multilingual national multi-ethnic discretionary service with mandatory 9(1)(h) distribution to Rogers, as Cartt.ca had previously reported.
“In the Decision’s relegation and monopoly granted to a single corporate entity, to purportedly speak for all other linguistic and ‘ethnic’ Canadians, who are non-Anglo and non-Franco, the Decision violates the very essence of sections 2,7,15 and 27 of the Charter, as well as the underlying constitutional imperative to Federalism and Respect for Minorities as enunciated by the SCC, in…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – Total broadcasting revenues sank 1.2% from 2017 to 2018 as television distribution providers (BDUs) posted negative growth for the fourth consecutive year, according to the CRTC’s statistical and financial results for the industry.
The Commission’s 2018 Broadcasting Financial Summaries Highlights reported that overall BDU revenues dropped by 2.0% ($168 million), falling from $8.58 billion in 2017 to $8.41 billion for the broadcast year ended August 31, 2018. IPTV revenues grew by 4.5% in 2018 to surpass the $2 billion mark, albeit at a slower rate than previous years. Satellite (DTH) service providers reported total revenues of $1.9…
Continue Reading
