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…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Canada’s 685 commercial radio stations reported total revenue of $1.62 billion in the 2013 broadcast year, virtually unchanged from the prior year, according to the CRTC’s latest statistical and financial report for this sector released Tuesday.
Despite competition from satellite, online and mobile services, total revenues for AM and FM stations increased by 0.26%, from $1.618 billion in 2012 to $1.623 billion in 2013. These revenues enable commercial radio stations to provide a variety of programming to Canadians, support established and emerging Canadian talent, and offer employment opportunities to over 10,200 people.
Over the past year, the CRTC…
Continue Reading
ELLIOT LAKE, ON – The DiversityCanada Foundation wants the Governor in Council to quash a section of the Wireless Code of Conduct regarding prepaid wireless service cards, after the CRTC declined to do so.
The Foundation and the National Pensioners Federation submitted a joint petition Monday seeking to overturn a provision in the Code that they say “permits Bell, Rogers, Telus and other wireless providers to place expiry dates on cash held in the accounts of 3.7 million prepaid wireless consumers”.
The petition claims that the CRTC breached its duty of procedural fairness by ignoring evidence that prepaid wireless accounts hold…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – “A suitable framework” and “a good interim measure” were the words Simon Lockie, chief regulatory officer at Wind Mobile, used to describe the federal government’s domestic wireless roaming plan as proposed in amendments to the Telecommunications Act during an appearance before a Senate committee on Tuesday.
In his opening remarks to the Standing Senate Committee on Transportation and Communications, Lockie launched a scathing indictment of not only the negotiations it held with its roaming partner, Rogers Communications, but also the terms of the roaming agreement. He described talks with Rogers as “an artifice of negotiations” that “were…
Continue Reading
GATINEAU – New entrants and would-be wireless providers find themselves trying to again convince the federal telecom regulator that it needs to intervene in the wireless market. At the same time however, the incumbent operators tell the CRTC everything is working just fine as it is.
The comments come as the CRTC is studying the wholesale wireless services market with the goal of determining if the market is competitive enough or whether it needs to impose more regulations on roaming, tower and site sharing and others. All interventions can be found here. The public hearing is scheduled for September…
Continue Reading
