Part VIII in our series on rewriting the Telecom and Broadcasting Acts
IT’S BEEN PRETTY CLEAR throughout Cartt.ca’s investigation of the opportunities and challenges associated with modernizing Canada’s telecommunications and broadcasting legislative frameworks that the Broadcasting Act appears most in need of updating.
We won’t rehash it here (check the prior seven articles on our “Investigates” page), but think Netflix and their online TV provider brethren and the myriad challenges facing media. That said, the Telecommunications Act requires some tweaking, too, according to interviews and comments in industry fora.
It’s been nearly two years since broadband services were…
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8e partie dans notre série sur la révision des Lois sur la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications
IL APPARAÎT CLAIREMENT au fil de notre enquête sur les défis et opportunités associés à la modernisation du cadre législatif de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications que la Loi sur la radiodiffusion semble celle qui a le plus besoin d’une mise à jour.
Nous ne passerons pas en revue tous les arguments (consultez les sept articles précédents sous l’onglet «Investigate»), mais pensez à Netflix et leurs confrères fournisseurs de télévision en ligne et à la myriade de défis rencontrés par…
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IT IS A LONGSTANDING aim of Canadian government policy to protect cultural industries from being overwhelmed by foreign, particularly American, content.
Cultural industries were first defined in the first Free Trade Agreement as an enterprise engaged in any of the following activities:
a) the publication, distribution, or sale of books… in print or machine readable form but not including the sole activity of printing or typesetting any of the foregoing,
b) the production, distribution, sale or exhibition of film or video recordings…
This definition was carried forward into NAFTA and our new agreement with the European Union. Both agreements contain special provisions…
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OTTAWA – Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) chair Sylvie Courtemanche has been named Woman of the Year by Women in Communications and Technology (WCT).
Prior to joining CBSC in January, Courtemanche (pictured) was a senior executive at Corus for both regulatory matters and government relations. She has also held roles as EVP policy and regulatory affairs for the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, legal counsel at the CRTC, and had her own consulting practice related to broadcasting and telecommunications in Canada.
Cogeco Connexion was named company of the year, and WCT also named 9 other recipients of its annual awards, which recognize…
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OTTAWA – The southern Ontario town of Aylmer may soon have some new telco competition courtesy of Iristel Inc.
The CRTC this week determined that a request by Iristel for local competition in the Aylmer exchange is bona fide, despite assertions to the contrary by Eastlink, which owns small incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) Amtelecom, in that territory.
“…the Commission finds that there are no regulatory issues indicating that Iristel’s request for local competition in the Aylmer exchange is not bona fide”, reads Telecom Decision CRTC 2018-82. “In the Commission’s view, it is a genuine or good faith request for…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has denied requests from both Bell and Telus seeking forbearance from the regulation of billing and collection service (BCS).
BCS is a mandated wholesale service that requires all local exchange carriers to bill and collect on behalf of alternate service providers (ASPs), such as long distance service providers, with respect to certain eligible services. These eligible services include casual long distance services (also known as 10-10 services), 900 services, collect call services, and bill-to-third call services. BCS enables an ASP to provide services to a local exchange customer without having a pre-existing billing relationship, or establishing…
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OTT players were granted a new level of confidentiality, but to what end?
SO, DID THE GLOBAL digital media powers respond to the CRTC’s request for their data by the March 2nd deadline? We have no idea.
Last month, in order to help inform the report on the audio/visual content consumption patterns of Canadians which the CRTC is preparing for the federal government, a range of companies were asked to provide competitively sensitive information by the Regulator. Besides some of the usual Canadian suspects, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Netflix and Spotify were asked…
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THE PROPOSED REVIEW of our communications acts is about to proceed, but the problem is finding a significant issue that legislative change would solve.
Of course, some improvements are possible, but I would gladly forego a few improvements if the alternative would be to subordinate the Telecom Act to the purposes of the Broadcasting Act.
Each Act has been perfected over time for the purposes it serves. To borrow internet terminology, the Telecom Act deals with market power at the transport and infrastructure layers. The Broadcasting Act deals with the perceived problem of Canadian content, namely that without subsidies and –…
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MONTREAL – Quebecor’s broadcaster/TV producer/publisher TVA Group reported last week that it posted $9.2 million in net income attributable to shareholders in the fourth quarter, up from $5.7 million in the same period in 2016.
Revenues, however, dropped to $155.3 million for the period ended December 31, 2017, down from $169.5 million year-over-year. This is due in part to $1.21 million unfavourable variance in its broadcasting and production segment, mainly because of a 9.5% decrease in the adjusted operating income of TVA Network, the company said in a press release.
“We are satisfied with our results for the last quarter…
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Part VII in our series on rewriting the Broadcasting and Telecom Acts
THE CANADIAN BROADCASTING ecosystem has entered a challenging era, but it’s not only the digital shift that has caused upheaval. Some argue vertical integration policies have caused just as much damage to the system.
As Brad Danks, CEO at OUTtv argued in a previous section (and in his own recent writings on the matter), vertical integration has failed the Canadian system to the detriment of the smaller independent players. This is where competition law should play a role, he added.
In OUTtv’s submission to the CRTC’s distribution models of the…
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