Videotron announced Thursday the expansion of wireless services to the Gaspesie and Cote-Nord regions, as well as a strengthened presence in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region thanks to the mobile virtual network operator regime mandated by the CRTC.
Résidents of Sept-Iles, Baie-Comeau, Port-Cartier, Gaspe, Matane, Chandler, Rimouski, Amqui and Sayabec, among other areas, can now get Videotron’s wireless services.
“We are proud to bring Videotron’s exceptional service and innovative, competitively priced plans to even more Quebecers,” Pierre Karl Peladeau, president and CEO of Quebecor, said in a press release.
“As we continue expanding our telecommunications services across Canada, our commitment to fostering competition for…
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By Connie Thiessen
Netflix has confirmed it’s pulling back on its film and television training and development programs in Canada, citing mandated CRTC contributions under the Online Streaming Act.
According to the streaming giant, it’s invested more than $25 million in training and development in Canada since 2017, including initiatives ranging from the Pacific Screenwriting Program, to a short documentary effort with Hot Docs, and a five-year partnership with the Canadian Film Centre (CFC) aimed at supporting Canadian talent.
A Netflix spokesperson told Broadcast Dialogue that following the CRTC’s decision to require online streaming services to contribute five per cent of their Canadian revenues to support the…
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By Connie Thiessen
Anthem Sports & Entertainment has reached an agreement to acquire Hollywood Suite, the owner and operator of four linear TV channels and accompanying digital on-demand service, pending CRTC approval.
Launched in 2011, Hollywood Suite is the largest pure-play movie service in Canada, with its film-focused 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s channels available in over 10 million homes via Rogers, Bell, Telus, Amazon Prime Video, Cogeco, Eastlink, and Freedom Mobile, among other cable providers.
Anthem – which has offices and studios in Toronto, Los Angeles, Denver, Nashville, New York, and Cleveland – says Hollywood Suite’s ability to satisfy both traditional linear viewers and on-demand focused digital…
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By Ahmad Hathout
The province of British Columbia wants the CRTC to stop treating with confidence granular broadband mapping information not designated as such by internet service providers.
The province filed a Part 1 application this month asking the CRTC to stop treating connectivity coverage data down to the 250-meter road segment as confidential if ISPs don’t treat it such. That information includes who services those areas and with what technology and speed.
It is asking that this information cease being deemed confidential and be made public or allowed to be made public in a way that can be searchable by address,…
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By Ahmad Hathout
The Independent Telecommunications Providers Association (ITPA) is urging the CRTC this month to reject a request from Telus to destandardize a form of legacy voice interconnection service in its operating territories because it would allegedly leave new competitors at the mercy of commercial negotiations with the dominant telco with no regulatory backstop.
Telus filed a request in early August asking the CRTC to destandardize and therefore no longer make available to new competitors legacy interconnection technology called time-division multiplexing (TDM) because it claims it hasn’t had a new customer on that technology in over three years and because…
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By Ahmad Hathout
A Conservative member of Parliament is expected to carry a petition, opened for signatures Tuesday, that asks the federal government to recover all taxpayer money that went into the production of the documentary “Russians at War.”
The petition, sponsored by Manitoba MP James Bezan and opening to 331 signatures so far, additionally asks that the government request that Canadian law enforcement agencies, including the RCMP and CSIS, investigate “potentially violations of Canadian, Ukrainian, or international law” by the lead filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova, who is Russian-Canadian; to work with the RCMP to “seize all materials collected and filmed as…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Corus has failed to show that any of its Disney-themed channels are comparable to Disney+ programming, making its undue preference complaint against Rogers unfounded, the cable giant said in response to the media company’s Part 1 application.
Corus filed the complaint last month alleging Rogers is giving itself an undue preference by trying to lure people to its Disney+ offerings – which Rogers provides in subscription and ad-supported formats – by manipulating how it positions those services to Corus’s Disney-theme specialty channels on the Ignite TV service, an aggregation platform. That manipulation allegedly includes the…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Saskatchewan Telecommunications Holding Corp. has fired Thursday the first challenge to the CRTC’s decision to force it to open its last-mile fibre facilities to its major competitors, alleging the regulator relied in its decision on a cabinet direction that was already beyond the jurisdiction of the Governor in Council.
“The CRTC, by adhering to the cabinet direction, conducted a lengthy consultative exercise, with input from a broad spectrum of industry participants and interested parties, including SaskTel, in service of making a determination that was, in effect, already made,” the Crown corporation says in its memorandum to the Federal…
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By Ahmad Hathout
An appeal application filed by the Canadian affiliate of an organization representing major foreign streaming giants that accuses the CRTC of baselessly forcing its members to contribute a portion of their Canadian revenues to news media should be tossed out because it was premature and the decision is a policy that cannot be challenged in court, according to the administrator of the fund that will handle the revenues.
The Canadian affiliate of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) – which includes Disney+, Netflix, Hayu, Paramount+, and PlutoTV – filed an application at the Federal Court of…
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By Len St-Aubin, a policy consultant who has worked for clients including Netflix, and was a member of the policy teams that developed the 1991 Broadcasting Act and the 1993 Telecommunications Act
On August 28, Cartt published Howard Law’s commentary rebutting my contention that Bill C-11 and CRTC regulation risk destabilizing market-driven CanCon.
Law took issue with my assertion that foreign streamers have driven the significant increase in foreign investment (FI) in CanCon over the last 10 years:
“…The fact is that foreign television companies around the globe were snapping up CanCon through pre-sales and advances…
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