OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The CRTC and the Competition Bureau are joining forces with regulators from United Kingdom and the United States to tackle the problem of phone number ‘spoofing’, according to a statement issued Monday.
Spoofing involves callers hiding their identity by causing a false or invalid phone number to display when making calls. It is a tactic often used by organizations carrying out unsolicited, misleading or even fraudulent telemarketing activities and can increase the harm caused to consumers from nuisance calls.
A ‘spoofed’ number on a call display might be a random series of digits,…
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TORONTO – CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais will kick off ‘Let's Talk TV: A Conversation with Canadians’ this Thursday at RTA School of Media at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Blais is scheduled to deliver a speech explaining why the CRTC is launching a national conversation about TV, what it entails and how Canadians can participate in this conversation.
For more information about ‘Let's Talk TV: A Conversation with Canadians’ check out the explanatory video here.
Follow the event on Twitter: @CRTCeng
Hashtags: #CRTC #TalkTV
www.crtc.gc.ca
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GATINEAU – The CRTC will kick off its hearing into the feasibility of establishing a Canadian video relay service (VRS) on Monday morning.
The hearing follows the Commission’s public consultation into the matter announced last March. Currently, two text-based relay services, Internet Protocol relay and teletypewriter relay, are available to Canadians who are deaf, hard of hearing or speech impaired. Video relay service would enable people who use sign language to communicate with voice telephone users via an operator who relays the conversation from sign language to spoken language, and vice versa.
Simultaneous translation of the…
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WHO’D A THUNK THE first submission to the CRTC’s television policy review would come straight from the federal government.
Today’s Speech from the Throne, delivered by Governor-General David Johnston, followed up what Industry Minister James Moore told the media over Thanksgiving weekend – that the federal government wants to dismantle the bundling of specialty channels so that Canadians have the choice to purchase them one at a time. The speech, which traditionally sets out government priorities for the next session of Parliament, did not spell out how the federal government will make that happen,…
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TORONTO – The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) is offering its “advice and assistance” to the federal government as it moves forward with unbundling television channels, as it announced it would do in Wednesday’s Speech from the Throne.
The national organization, which represents the interests of 22,000 professional performers working in the English-language recorded media in Canada, expressed concerns on the impact the move may have on the 262,700 full time equivalent jobs in the country’s film and television industry.
“While we were disappointed to not hear a clear commitment…
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OTTAWA – Canadians who have eschewed their landlines for cell phones only are also more likely to watch video and listen to audio on their devices, according to a new study from Media Technology Monitor.
With the CRTC projecting that approximately 20% of Canadian households will be Cell Phone Only (CPO) by 2015, the MTM incorporated a CPO household sample into its annual survey to learn more about this unique group of people for the first time. This new report provides an overview of the CPO individual with respect to demographics, technology ownership and media use and compares…
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INDUSTRY MINISTER JAMES MOORE likely caused a number of folks in the Canadian subscription TV business to choke on their turkey this Thanksgiving weekend.
In a few media interviews, Moore dropped a preview bomb of this Wednesday’s Throne Speech by saying the federal Conservative government will make it its business to micromanage sectors of the economy, beginning with dismantling the TV channel packaging practices of Canadian broadcasters and broadcast distribution undertakings. “We don’t think it’s right for Canadians to have to pay for bundled television channels that they don’t watch,” he told CTV’s Question Period in an interview broadcast Sunday…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Union Calling Inc. have paid $115,000 in penalties as part of a settlement over the use of robocalls that violated the country’s telemarketing rules.
The CRTC said Tuesday that its investigation found that the Canadian Union of Postal Workers failed to identify itself or provide its contact information in robocalls made to residents of Ontario. The union hired a company, Union Calling Inc., to deliver pre-recorded messages between May 21 and June 26, 2013 regarding the possible closure or downsizing of post offices in certain communities.
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OTTAWA – There is no working market for domestic wholesale roaming in Canada, which has led to sky-high rates that injure competition, says Halifax-based cable and wireless company Eastlink. Conversely, Bell Mobility argues new entrants have the choice of three providers, all of which are girding for roaming business.
In comments to the CRTC’s investigation into domestic and international roaming, Eastlink says the incumbents’ wholesale domestic roaming rates are much higher than their retail rates and thus “are inherently commercially unreasonable.” It adds these rates “are a significant obstacle to new entrants’ ability to compete over…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Canadians are being asked to weigh in on the future of their 9-1-1 emergency services.
The CRTC issued the call for comments Thursday, the same day that it publicly released a report authored by former Commissioner Timothy Denton which examines 9-1-1 services in light of the telecommunications system’s evolution to next-generation networks based on Internet Protocol.
A Report on Matters Related to Emergency 9-1-1 focuses on the performance and adequacy of the technology currently employed for 9-1-1 services, such as that used to locate a caller who is using a cellphone; the issues related to the provision of 9-1-1…
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