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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BANFF – Identity figured prominently as Monday took shape at the 2015 Banff World Media Festival.
Jill Soloway, creator of Transparent, provided her own version of the paradox of plenty in the digital age. Apparently, trans exclusionary radical feminists, TERFs for short, are taking considerable exception to transgender glamorizations such as those on her show, she said.
Even The New York Times has engaged this latest bits and bytes controversy, with articles claiming that trans-gendered men who become women have never experienced the anxieties and oppression of menstrual periods, unwanted pregnancies or the other challenges of growing up as a girl.
But…
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THE QUEBEC GOVERNMENT intends to interfere in commerce on the Internet, the free choice of Quebecers to choose with whom to do business, and to require ISPs to establish an architecture of censorship, all with a view to driving users willy-nilly to Quebec’s official gambling site.
These measures were announced in the Quebec budget of March 2015.
As an aside, I note there has not yet been a word of protest from any quarters, including the federal government. Why is this proposal to transgress federal jurisdiction over communications undertakings going unchallenged? Consider that the CRTC recently blasted…
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BANFF – While the future of television seems to have hogged the spotlight lately, CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais told broadcasters on Thursday that radio stations, like TV broadcasters, must be innovative and focused on the future in order to survive.
Speaking at the annual conference of the Western Association of Broadcasters in what he described as the first part of a two-part speech (with the second part to be delivered at the Banff World Media Festival), Blais said that radio does more than just inform, educate and entertain. It also “forms important connections to local communities across the country” and is still the first…
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