OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT promised a review of the Broadcasting and Telecommunication Acts in its 2017 budget and last week the CRTC took the first step down this path when it issued: Harnessing Change: The Future of Programming Distribution in Canada.
While it floated a number of interesting, innovative and controversial ideas, we’re all anxious to hear what Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly will have to say about it this weekend when she addresses the Banff International Media Fest. There, we hear she is likely to announce the appointment of a worthy and carefully chosen panel of experts to undertake a year-long project…
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TORONTO – Can cord cutting in Canada be halted, or at least slowed, by solving the country’s “drama problem”?
Veteran lawyer and engineer Peter Miller and Ken Engelhart, former SVP regulatory and chief privacy officer of Rogers Communications, think so. Speaking Wednesday at the CTAM Canada Leadership Forum in Toronto, the duo drove home some key points from their recent report Strengthening Canadian Television Content: Creation, Discovery and Export in a Digital World, penned with Lawson Hunter for the C.D Howe Institute.
The “drama problem”, according to Engelhart, is the dearth of big budget, well-produced, made-in-Canada dramas that would conceivably…
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GATINEAU – The communications needs of most Canadians are met with land-line telephones (still) and wireless plans. But if you’re a deaf, deaf-blind or hard of hearing Canadian (DDBHH), wireless video is essential. It offers mobility and efficiency, but of course video consumes a lot more data than voice.
So, when the CRTC determined the gap in the wireless service market was low-cost data-only service, or skinny wireless, and asked the big wireless companies to file new prices and capacities, the deaf community paid attention.
First, for them, the voice portion of any package is hardly useful, neither is voicemail service….
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TORONTO – Canadian 9-1-1 experts met at the end of May as the community continues to move forward towards the June 2020 deadline to transition to Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1).
Hosted by Rogers in downtown Toronto, the three-day meeting of the Emergency Services Working Group (ESWG) featured highly technical discussions around standards and operational best practices. Approximately 80 experts from across the country attended the meeting in person, with more joining by phone. Coincidentally, the ESWG meeting followed on the heels of an important CRTC Decision.
In Telecom Decision CRTC 2018-188, the Commission varied an earlier…
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Competition Bureau invokes Sugar Wireless as a model to follow
GATINEAU – “Generally, the Bureau does not favour price controls. However, the presence of market power in this industry; the natural experiment offered by Sugar Mobile’s attempted entry into the wireless services industry; and the fact that similar LCDO Plans have arisen without government intervention in some foreign jurisdictions informs the Bureau’s view that LCDO Plans can increase economic welfare and consumer choice in Canada’s wireless industry.”
So says the Competition Bureau of Canada’s submission to the CRTC about the low-cost data only wireless plans submitted to…
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WE’VE HEARD LOADS OF discussion and debate since the official launch of the review of the Broadcasting Act – along with the Telecom and Radiocommunication Act – and with another year of discussion and debate on the horizon, the best first course of action to solve the tricky and complex policy challenges ahead is to ask (and answer) the right questions in the right order – and right now.
I’ve thought of five important questions which should be answered first, ahead of anything else. I’d argue much of the discussion around proposals such as combining the two Acts should come far…
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THE PROBLEMS START WITH the title.
Harnessing Change (the report on the future of programming and its distribution in Canada) reflects a long history of Canadian governments and the CRTC sticking fingers in holes in the dike of broadcasting policy and regulation, to keep out invading hordes, while communications technologies undermine the dike's foundations — from without and from within — because Canadians have consistently been early, eager and rapid, adopters.
Little wonder that it was Canadian Marshall McLuhan who coined the phrase "the medium is the message": Communications media influence societies more than the content that…
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TORONTO – “There’s no doubt in our minds that the power of the bundle is true and helps us in grabbing more market share,” said Quebecor’s Jean-François Pruneau Wednesday during Scotiabank’s Telecom, Media and Technology Conference held in Toronto.
“This is an infrastructure business. The more the company has, the more savings we can realize and pass onto the customer. Vidéotron has a strong reputation of being innovative about services, but also about the way we approach the customer dynamic with respect to promotions and value add,” said the broadcaster, cable company and wireless operator’s CFO.
“Whether you’re talking about services…
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OTTAWA – The Federal Government has ordered a public inquiry into the alleged high-pressure sales tactics used by the country’s biggest telecommunication companies.
Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, said Thursday that the Feds have directed the CRTC to conduct the inquiry and ensure that “Canadians have an opportunity to be heard and these issues are carefully considered”. The Commission will have until February 28, 2019 to complete the inquiry and file a report that must contain potential solutions to ensure Canadian consumers are treated fairly.
The Minister Bains also asked the Competition Bureau to assist the…
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WE’VE HEARD NOTHING but discussion and debate since the official launch of the review of the Broadcasting Act – along with the Telecom and Radiocommunication Act – and with another year of discussion and debate on the horizon, the best first course of action to solve the tricky and complex policy challenges ahead is to ask (and answer) the right questions in the right order – and right now.
I’ve thought of five extremely important questions which should be answered first, ahead of anything else. I’d argue much of the discussion around proposals such as combining the two Acts should come…
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