TORONTO – Wholesale wireless service continues to be a prickly topic between wireless incumbents and new entrants, and quickly became a dominant theme Tuesday morning during the Canadian Telecom Summit’s annual regulatory blockbuster panel, moderated again this year by Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien.
Bell, Rogers and Telus remained steadfast in their collective belief that increased regulation on wholesale wireless services will result in decreased network investments. Ken Engelhart, SVP regulatory for Rogers Communications, got that ball rolling early in the 90 minute panel, raising the matter in his opening “trite observations”.
“Wholesale regulation inevitably leads to a reduction in investment,…
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TORONTO – There are some conference organizers from whom you never hear a word, discouraging or otherwise. Not so for Michael Sone and Mark Goldberg, the owners and organizers of the Canadian Telecom Summit, now in its 13th year.
They generally set the overall tone for the conference with a punchy opening speech, delivered in tag-team format and this year was no different when they opened the gathering Monday morning.
“While wireless services flourish with new gadgets and a never-ending stream of new apps and services raising connectivity and instantaneous communication to new heights, the promise of new competition in mobile…
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OTTAWA – Content providers, regulators, policy makers, and industry experts are invited to attend this year’s IIC Canada 2014 Conference in Ottawa on October 21 – 22, 2014.
The Canadian communications industries are being re-shaped by major changes in technology, industry structure, government and regulatory policy. Now that the federal government has released its long-awaited Digital Strategy and the CRTC's Let's Talk TV proceeding is well underway, the question is: what comes next?
The conference will bring together leading communications sector players to explore what the future will look like for Canadian consumers and providers of communications services and…
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BANFF – One of the funkiest sessions at Banff was titled "Consumers and Choice: What Works And What Doesn't". In the context of the federal government’s Throne Speech promise to unbundle cable packages, and the CRTC's current "Let's Talk TV" process, it was neatly provocative.
The speaker was Dilip Soman, professor of marketing and Corus Chair in Communications Strategy at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
It turns out that, across a range of reputable research on several continents, people aren't very good at predicting their future behaviour or making rational choices.
Take the drink Snapple. Fifteen years ago there…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC’s National Do Not Call List levied $3,050,595 in fees in the 2013-14 fiscal year.
In a public notice this week, the Commission said that this amount represented the actual fees payable by those persons who subscribed to the National Do Not Call List (DNCL) and paid the CRTC’s component of the fees. The Regulator also estimated its telemarketing regulatory costs for fiscal year 2014-15 at $3.3 million.
The Unsolicited Telecommunications Fees Regulations came into force on April 1, 2013 and prescribe fees that will be assessed in order to recover the CRTC’s costs associated with…
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TORONTO – Last week the three largest private English language broadcasters all laid down their cards and showed their hands for the upcoming fall TV season.
While some of what we heard and saw was predictable (Rogers is hockey mad, Shaw’s Global is drama-happy and Bell took a shot or two at the amount of money Rogers spent on hockey…), there were some surprises, as well. The biggest is that Rogers has compressed what it considers Citytv’s prime time from 8 to 10 p.m. only, leaving the 10-11 hour primarily to CTV and Global (and CHCH, too).
What’s the deal at…
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BANFF – On Sunday, seven wise folk sat as a panel to road-map what the future holds for our business.
These were: moderator Peter Sussman, executive director of Aver Media Finance (part of BMO); Jeremy Butteriss of Google Canada; Walter Levitt the CMO of Comedy Central; Kirstine Stewart the managing director of Twitter Canada; John Morayniss the CEO at EOneTV; Peter Schube the president and CEO of Jim Henson Co.; and Barbara Williams, Shaw Media's content SVP.
Let's make it clear that Williams (right) was just kidding when she exclaimed she only needed a job for three more years, so could…
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BANFF – Back in the day we had a plethora of annual Canadian industry events and mass huddles.
There was the Canadian Association of Broadcasters annual confab, and the BDU and cable lads with their CCTA round-up, among others.
Now when it comes to annual gatherings of we media types and our attendant bureaucrats, there's the International Institute of Communications highbrow event in Ottawa in the fall, the yearly CMPA yearly full court press in Ottawa in the winter, and a smattering of smaller events, but only Banff features the people, technology, and global programming so quickly changing the landscape of…
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TORONTO – Rogers received close to 175,000 requests for customer data from federal agencies in 2013, the company disclosed Thursday in its first ever Transparency Report.
As Cartt.ca reported, a coalition of Canadian academics and consumer groups asked the country’s biggest telecommunications service providers in January to reveal the extent to which they pass on their customers’ private information to government agencies when asked. Sixteen different telcos were asked to respond or commit to responding by March 3, 2014.
Rogers said in the report that it fully complies with Canadian privacy law and actively safeguards its customers’ information. At the…
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TORONTO – Given the pile of money Rogers Communications paid for the rights to the National Hockey League games for the next 12 years, look for the wholesale fees paid for sports by BDUs – and their customers – to shoot up.
A research report recently published by Scotia Capital analyst Jeff Fan says that if you think sports makes up a big portion of BDUs’ programming costs now, just wait. When the sports genre was deregulated by the CRTC back in 2010, CTV/Bell Media served notice that rates for TSN (which had been the same for more than a…
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