Media company said its application serves to show urgency of situation
By Ahmad Hathout
Blue Ant Media has filed a Part 1 application requesting that the CRTC reduce its required spending on programs of national interest, citing a stranglehold on its ability to spend money on content that its audiences want to watch.
In the two-page filing, dated June 20 but posted to the CRTC website Thursday, the media company asks that it be allowed to put five, instead of 13.5, per cent of its previous year’s revenues into PNI, which it said “force broadcasters to spend their production budgets on certain…
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Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced Tuesday the appointment of Drew Olsen as vice chair and CEO of the Copyright Board of Canada for a five-year term, starting Aug. 26.
In this position, Olsen will lead the work of the Copyright Board as well as supervise and direct board staff. He succeeds Nathalie Théberge, who was recently appointed as the CRTC’s vice chair of broadcasting for a five-year term that began in April.
Olsen is currently associate director general of the audiovisual branch at Canadian Heritage. While at the department, he has held other leadership…
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Media company says it is confident in slate of rebranded and new content after losing Discovery rights
By Ahmad Hathout
Corus Entertainment executives said Monday that the pure-play media company is expecting to make further cuts to full-time positions, which will bring the total by the end of August to almost 800, or 25 per cent, since the beginning of its fiscal year in September.
“Our board of directors has given us a clear mandate to decisively right-size the business and create a more sustainable future,” John Gossling, co-CEO of Corus and chief financial officer, said on a third quarter conference call…
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The Canada Media Fund (CMF) on Monday invited industry members and organizations to help shape its 2024-2027 Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) Strategy by sharing their insights at in-person forums or via virtual sessions during the month of July.
EDIA community members can attend in-person sessions in Toronto (July 17), Vancouver (July 24) or Montreal (July 30). The meetings can also be joined virtually on Zoom, according to information on the registration form here. Industry organizations are invited to attend virtual sessions on July 29 in English and on July 31 in…
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The combination of measures that Rogers undertook after its major service outage in July 2022 are satisfactory to improve the Rogers network resiliency and reliability as well as to address the root cause of the outage, according to a report by Xona Partners Inc. released last week by the CRTC.
The report, commissioned by the CRTC via a contract awarded in 2023, details the results of an independent assessment of the Rogers network architecture for reliability and resiliency, as well as the processes in place at Rogers to manage network changes and…
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By Ahmad Hathout
A consortium of large cable companies is blasting a proposal by Telus to significantly increase its pole attachment rate in British Columbia and Alberta, saying it will unjustly cost third parties millions of dollars in extra payments annually.
In April, Telus filed a proposal to increase its rate per pole by just over 50 per cent, from $19.33 annually, or $1.61 monthly, to $29.83, or $2.49 per month. It said it needs to do this because of significant cost increases since the last approved tariff in 2010, which include a faster-than-average replacing of existing poles and increased costs…
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Telus announced Tuesday several private investments totalling $21.1 million to deploy and update its networks in Quebec’s Lower St. Lawrence, Gaspé Peninsula and North Shore regions.
These investments are being paired with financial contributions of $17.55 million from the government of Quebec and $14.4 million from the CRTC’s Broadband Fund, which will allow for the addition of a total of 35 new 5G wireless sites across the three regions, according to Telus.
In the Lower St. Lawrence region, money from the Quebec government announced in April will enable 12 new sites to be built to…
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By Connie Thiessen
Corus Entertainment has pulled the plug on two of its AM radio formats in Vancouver and Edmonton, and laid off staff.
880 News (CHQT-AM) Edmonton, a sister station to 630 CHED, had been owned by Corus since 2000. It was re-launched as an all-news station in 2008. It has regularly finished near the bottom of the PPM ratings in the market.
AM 730 (CKGO-AM) Vancouver, a sister station to 980 CKNW, was formerly branded as Mojo Sports Radio, prior to the launch of what was billed as North America’s only “all-traffic” station in 2006. It’s also served as the primary game broadcaster for select local sports…
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A private member’s bill that proposed amending the Telecommunications Act to require internet service providers to provide Canadians with the “typical” download and upload speeds that customers should expect during peak periods received royal assent last week, after passing third reading in the Senate earlier this month.
Bill C-288 was introduced in 2022 by Dan Mazier, Conservative Member of Parliament for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, who wanted the act to be amended so ISPs could not use language such as “up to” and “maximum” to advertise theoretical speeds when marketing their internet packages.
In April 2023, Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne…
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Videotron says no undue preference or disadvantage
By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers is alleging Videotron has refused to allow the cable giant to audit its subscriber information for the purposes of determining whether it’s paying a proper rate of access for Rogers’s OMNI Regional programming.
The comments come in an intervention supporting a complaint by not-for-profit media company Accessible Media Inc. (AMI), which alleges Videotron is forcing it to sign a pre-audit memorandum of understanding (MOU) before AMI is allowed to analyze Videotron’s subscriber records. The problem, according to AMI, is that the MOU includes language that turns bulk subscribers from institutions like…
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