By Ahmad Hathout
The director of media for Canada’s largest private sector union said Tuesday the CRTC could view local news as a service of “exceptional importance,” making it qualify for mandatory distribution, to drive more support for the expensive-to-produce programming.
Such a mandatory distribution could be imposed on online streamers as well, said Unifor’s Randy Kitt, who urged the commission to not let market forces determine the fate of a sector that has seen mass layoffs recently.
“We’ll just lose more jobs, we’ll lose more journalists, we’ll have more news deserts, and our democracy will slip away,” Kitt said about the…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Pushing back against the assertion that the public broadcaster should take up the mantle of at-risk programs where private broadcasters have struggled, CBC’s executive vice president said this must be a whole-of-system effort.
“We feel that we should not be seen as a gap filler for the problems of the other broadcasters – that where market forces don’t come easily to their decisions about programming – it shouldn’t just be assumed not to worry about it, the CBC will do it,” Barbara Williams told the five-member CRTC panel on the second-last day of its hearing into the definition…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers executives said Friday they feared the CRTC would come out of its hearings on the modernization of the Broadcasting Act emboldened to try to regulate some of the issues it has identified during its current proceeding instead of loosening the regulatory grip it has had on traditional broadcasters.
“We can’t rely on the traditional tools anymore,” said Dean Shaikh, the company’s senior vice president of regulatory affairs. “We no longer have a closed system. We’re competing against massive online streaming giants that have no rules. We need much more flexibility to compete for audiences, subscribers, advertising dollars…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Bell executives told the CRTC on Thursday that the broadcaster doesn’t need outside funding support for news production – just an easing of requirements on a losing product like community news.
“We’re losing $40 million a year in the conventional newscast,” said Jonathan Daniels, Bell’s vice president of regulatory law. “And so we looked at what would just be a better way that we could help finance that. And so we suggested that it was a redirecting of money from the community TV … because it’s just not been a very successful product.”
The executives said the company spends…
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Quebecor Media subsidiary TVA Group announced Wednesday several layoffs, primarily in its television division, as the broadcaster faces an uncertain future due to ongoing financial challenges, the Montreal-based company said.
“TVA Group, like other private broadcasters, is operating in a steadily deteriorating business environment and continues to absorb substantial financial losses while competing on an uneven playing field,” Quebecor President and CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau, who is the acting president and CEO of TVA Group, said in a press release.
“In this alarming situation, TVA Group is forced to cut some 30 jobs,…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Quebecor executives said Wednesday that Radio-Canada, the French-language version of the CBC, should be made to step-up on producing children’s programming because it has become economically difficult to do so for private broadcasters.
The company’s vice president of public and regulatory affairs told the five-member CRTC panel in response to a question about how to sustain the delivery of children’s programming that the public broadcaster — which is already required by the CRTC to broadcast a certain number of hours of kids programming — should pick up where private broadcasters have failed.
“We hope the mandate of Radio-Canada will…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Telus is alleging in an undue preference complaint made public Wednesday that Bell is deliberately obstructing its ability to introduce its broadcasting services over the larger telco’s last-mile fibre facilities in eastern Canada.
Telus claims in the complaint that it has made “repeated requests … over the course of several months” to pave the way to include its BDU systems on Bell’s fibre facilities but was allegedly denied based on reasons that are redacted from the complaint.
Telus says it wants the CRTC to force Bell to allow it to distribute its own programming services in these leased network…
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Quebec’s Minister of Culture and Communications Mathieu Lacombe on Wednesday tabled in the Quebec National Assembly Bill 109, An Act to affirm Québec’s cultural sovereignty and to enact an Act respecting the discoverability of Francophone cultural content in the digital environment.
Minister Lacombe also proposed introducing in Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms “a right of access to cultural content of original Francophone expression”, according to an English translation of a Quebec government press release.
This introduction of a right to discoverability and access to French-language content in the Charter “would serve to promote the presence,…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers and Quebecor are challenging a decision by the CRTC to extend by two years the implementation of the next-generation 911 service, saying they will be forced to assume millions of dollars in unnecessary costs for a longer period of time.
The CRTC in March extended by two years the full implementation deadline for the new system, which will allow first responders to receive texts and multimedia messages from distressed callers. Crucially with that decision, the regulator maintained the dual-rate model, meaning originating network providers (ONPs) – which link up with Bell and Telus, the managers of the…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Telus has filed a notice of discontinuance requesting the Federal Court of Appeal no longer consider its judicial review application challenging an order from the federal cabinet recommending the CRTC contemplate banning the “Big Three” from access to the last-mile fibre regime.
The Vancouver-based telco insisted in March that its case was still relevant – despite the CRTC declining to change its November 2023 interim decision in response to the cabinet order – because the government still had another opportunity to vary or rescind that subsequent decision by May 5.
That date has come and gone…
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