OTTAWA – Rogers Media resolutely defended its decision to cut all news programming from its ethnic OMNI stations and replace it with current affairs shows before a Parliamentary committee on Wednesday.
Speaking before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, Rogers Media president Keith Pelley (pictured on CPAC.ca, which streamed the meeting) said the company really had no choice but to make changes to its programming. With viewer consumption patterns moving to digital platforms, the ongoing piracy problem, the significant drop in advertising revenue, as well as a plethora of ethnic specialty channels launched in recent…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The CRTC will be recognized with a 2015 Public Service Award of Excellence this fall for its work on modernizing northern telecommunications.
The Public Service Award of Excellence recognizes employees who have demonstrated excellence in achieving results for Canadians and who reflect the priorities of the public service, while demonstrating key leadership competencies. Commission employees will receive an award in the category of Excellence in Policy.
For the first time in its history, the CRTC travelled north of the Arctic Circle to hold a public hearing in Inuvik. The CRTC said that the regulatory policy that resulted…
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PETER MILLER'S ARTICLE last week seeks to make it look reasonable that the government should regulate the right of people to upload video to the Internet. His proposal – or more like, his unstated assumption – is that people should need to be licensed under the Broadcasting Act in order to post video to the net.
It is not a reasonable, practical or sensible idea.
Since he knows this as well as I do, his article seeks to confuse the issue at many levels.
The Internet is regulated as speech or printing, and is subject to all the…
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GATINEAU and YELLOWKNIFE – Northwestel has told the CRTC that unless it's allowed to levy a $20 per customer surcharge on standalone residential DSL customers in band H1 communities or receives an exogenous price cap adjustment of $8.5 million, its plans to continue a rollout of 15/1 Mbps Internet service to 42 more communities is in jeopardy.
The company's comments come in an appeal of Telecom Decision 2015-78 in which the commission ordered Northwestel to stop charging standalone DSL customers an extra fee and to cut lower-speed retail Internet rates by 10% and higher-speed ones by 30%….
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TORONTO and GATINEAU – The way CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais has consolidated power in his office – trying to tell commissioners when and where they can speak and what they can say – runs counter to everything it means to be a CRTC commissioner, says a 57-page affidavit Ontario regional commissioner Raj Shoan has filed with the Federal Court of Canada in support of his application for a judicial review of Blais.
As Cartt.ca reported in April, Shoan filed an application for a judicial review after an internal CRTC investigation, performed by a third party, found…
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I LOVE TIMOTHY DENTON’s diatribes. I love them every time he writes them, such as the one Cartt.ca ran on Tuesday
(Maybe that’s because I write them too. It’s just that mine tend to be less frequent and in the form of 40 page reports). Timothy’s blogs (diatribes) are witty, succinct and often bang on. Except when it comes to regulating the internet.
When it comes to regulating the Internet, Timothy Denton is prophet. A prophet of the doom that will become mankind if we were ever to regulate the internet. The firestorm and maelstrom. It will…
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BANFF – Telling trends from fads is too often a mugs game. A peek at Amazon suggests that a book on trends seems to be written every 15 minutes and at times, here in Banff, it was frequently difficult to parse true trends from professional aspiration or wishful thinking.
But we did get some glimpses.
Canadians have over 600 television services to choose from, and one in four of us is a four screen consumer (TV, tablet, PC, phone) and the emerging bias to enhanced pick-and-pay was viewed by many as heralding more investment in programming to survive in a world…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The CRTC is asking Canadians to weigh in on the country’s message relay services to help it determine whether its policies are meeting users’ needs.
Teletypewriter (TTY) and Internet protocol (IP) relay services, together called message relay services, provide a means of communication to people who are Deaf or hard of hearing and people with speech disabilities.
In a teletypewriter relay service call, the relay operator communicates with the person who has a hearing or speech disability via TTY (text) and with the person without a hearing or speech disability via voice. A person who is Deaf, hard of…
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TORONTO — Juggling the daily demands of directing one of Canada’s major national news organizations, while also overseeing a structural migration to digital and maintaining journalistic integrity in the face of internal and external attempts to influence editorial decisions, is keeping the country’s top news executives on their toes.
The heads of the three major Canadian television news organizations (two of which are also the biggest radio operators) took part in a panel discussion Friday that kicked off RTDNA Canada’s annual conference in Toronto. The special “Bear Pit” panel, moderated by Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien, featured a lively…
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TORONTO — Adding some broadcast content into the mix at the Canadian Telecom Summit last week, experts from the video content creation and distribution industries discussed the challenges and opportunities arising from the advent of over-the-top services during a special panel discussion.
OTT is about a “content revolution”, said George Burger, advisor at Internet TV provider VMedia, an upstart BDU. “ a massively disruptive event…and it’s going to make the disruption that happened to the music industry, with Napster, pale in comparison completely,” Burger said.
“It’s flourishing from the consumer point of view. Consumers have never, ever had it better,”…
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