OTTAWA–GATINEAU – The CRTC kicked off its part in the Broadcasting and Telecom Acts review Thursday by asking Canadians how they will access audio and video content in the coming years and its impact on the Canadian market.
The call for comments, the first phase of the proceeding, comes on the heels of the Governor-in-Council’s directive for a report due June 1st on future distribution models for Canadian programming, as well as its continued creation, production and distribution.
The Commission added that it intends to publish further documents and details on the second phase, based on the comments received in…
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GATINEAU – New CRTC chairman Ian Scott will preside over his first hearing in his new post beginning Monday morning – the second phase of the licence renewal process for terrestrial broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs).
Last year’s phase one was the Commission calling the carriers on the carpet to answer complaints that they were not properly marketing the CRTC-mandated skinny basic package or correctly selling channels a-la-carte, as told.
That hearing found that the carriers were operating within the rules as written and renewed their licenses for just one more year, so that an additional hearing…
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OTTAWA – Bell Canada and Rogers Communications showed off some different philosophies when it came to the federal government’s NAFTA negotiations when they appeared recently in front of a recent meeting of the Standing Committee on International Trade.
Rogers Cable vice-president, regulatory, Pam Dinsmore said in her opening remarks on September 20th that her company is concerned the trade talks will wander too far from its prior mandate and into copyright, which includes such issues as retransmitting U.S. over-the-air TV signals, Canada’s notice-and-notice regime for pirated online content, and our Copyright Modernization Act’s provisions for personal use and its…
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WHILE WE’VE MENTIONED it a couple of times during the 12 days (only 12!?) since Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly announced her Creative Canada vision, it seems the news that the federal government has decided to see if it can levy a tax on Internet service providers in order to help fund the production of Canadian content has been overlooked.
The initial proof of this came when the Governor-in-Council directed the CRTC to get cracking on a new report that will reveal: “a) the distribution model or models of programming that are likely…
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ALTHOUGH WE NOW LIVE in a vast internet landscape with immense amounts of content, the diversity and quality of the news media we consume continues to be a concern. Large sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google should not be trusted to solve these problems.
Internet news platforms have contributed to the closure of traditional news outlets that are the source of much of the quality news consumed online. The internet has facilitated the rise to dominance of…
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MONTREAL — EBOX, an independent Internet and phone service provider in Quebec and Ontario, hasn’t yet launched its new television distribution service, but already it’s had to file a complaint against Canada’s biggest broadcaster, Bell Media, accusing the media giant of blacklisting it for competitive reasons.
The complaint, published last week by the CRTC, says that EBOX has been trying since November 2016 to negotiate carriage of Bell’s discretionary services, including TSN, Discovery, Space and Bravo. After reaching an impasse, the company asked the Commission to arbitrate a deal on five of Bell’s 24 services.
EBOX’s complaint states that after…
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THE NINE MOST FRIGHTENING words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” according to an old joke popularized by former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. It’s funny ’cause it’s true.
Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and her communications team must have forgotten this as they prepared for the announcement last week of her new Creative Canada policy framework (which offers some vision but punts many details down the field) – and augmented it with a shiny headline – the announcement Netflix will invest $500 million in Canada over the next five years.
Beyond her speech and…
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Quebec’s TV lords are upset
I RECALL THE DELEGATION of the Quebec media production types appearing before us – a panel of CRTC commissioners – when we were considering the extension of the Broadcasting Act to the Internet.
The issue was whether every Canadian website should be licenced by the state, and taxed, to supply funds for Canadian video programming. When asked whether they understood of the scale of government intrusion into communications, one of the panelists slammed her fist on the table and said "regulate it first, then we'll figure out what it means!".
Ah, the true descendants of Louis XIV…
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OTTAWA – New CRTC chair and CEO Ian Scott (pictured) will make his first public speech at next month’s New Developments in Communications Law and Policy.
Presented by the Canadian Chapter of the International Institute of Communications, the event will take place November 14 -15 at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa. The conference will provide opportunities to hear from and network with the lawyers, regulators and business leaders at the heart of the Canadian communications industry.
Other newly confirmed speakers include Grace Koh, special assistant to U.S. President Trump for Technology, Telecom and Cybersecurity, as well as U.S. FCC Commissioner…
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TORONTO – As it threatened weeks ago, Unifor, the union which represents journalists and television employees at Rogers’ OMNI TV, has filed a complaint with the CRTC over the broadcaster’s decision to hire Fairchild TV to create its Chinese news broadcasts.
The union believes that violates its CRTC licence.
“The CRTC gave Rogers a special licence with guaranteed income to bring back the Chinese language daily news for the nation’s largest immigrant community,” said Unifor media director Howard Law, in a press release. “Instead of producing the show themselves and adding to the…
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