REGINA – The Saskatchewan government has pulled the plug on the province’s public educational broadcaster SCN after nearly 20 years on the air.
Some of SCN’s assets – such as satellite distance education classes, broadcast of the Legislative channel, and connectivity to the provincial public safety telecommunications network, will be transferred to SaskTel this Spring, but the SCN Corporation is scheduled to shut down by May.
"SCN provided many important services and we are ensuring those continue," said Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport Minister Dustin Duncan, in a statement. "The broadcast industry has changed drastically since SCN was created nearly 20…
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MONTREAL – Quebecor Media said that Monday’s CRTC decision is only a “partial solution” to what ails the broadcasting industry.
The company said that it “deplores” the Commission’s decision to “tackle the current structural crisis through a scheme that is not based squarely on a rebalancing of the system”, which it called the only solution designed to protect consumers.
“The approach advocated by Quebecor Media would shield consumers from rate hikes by maintaining the total fees paid by cable and satellite service providers at current levels”, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. It proposed a model that would distribute the…
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TORONTO – Add the Writers Guild of Canada (WGC) to those backing Monday’s CRTC decision on new TV policy.
The WGC said that it is “optimistic” about the re-introduction of expenditure requirements, though said that it needs to do some modelling to determine if the spending requirements and drama minimums in the new policy are enough “to make a real difference”.
“The CRTC heard us”, said executive director Maureen Parker, in a statement. “This policy marks a philosophical shift. The re-introduction of expenditure requirements will help build the supply of Canadian programming, including high-quality dramas and documentaries. And expenditure…
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IF YOU TALK TO ANYONE under 20 they will consider it quaint to hear tales of phones that were connected to walls; notes that were sent with a stamp; and televisions that were housed in large cabinets offering four channels, if you were lucky, accessible with the turn of a dial.
Online and offline; wired and wireless, the world is a dramatically different place than it was 19 years ago. Yet the Canadian media market is still governed by broadcasting legislation from 1991 at a time when urgent action is needed to bring regulation in line with technology to meet…
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"NEVERTHELESS, THE SYSTEM is not working well in 2010 in ensuring that conventional television broadcasters have the means to continue to meet their obligations under the Act."
That quote – from paragraph 162 in yesterday’s decision on “A group-based approach to the licensing of private television services”, which set out new rules for a number of things, but all most appeared to care about was the fee-for-carriage/value-for-signal donnybrook – says it all. Private broadcasters are pleased. Carriers are not.
Whatever the outcome of the Federal Court filing that will need to happen before the broadcasters can solicit new wholesale…
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OTTAWA – The CBC was specifically denied inclusion into the value for signal club on Monday by the CRTC.
The Broadcasting Act specifically says the CBC has to be made available to the largest number of Canadians possible. But, the new value-for-signal regime would let broadcasters pull their signals in a contract dispute.
Those two ideas don’t go together, said the Commission.
“(T)he Commission notes that section 3(1)(m)(vii) of the Act states that the programming provided by the CBC should ‘be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means and as resources become available for the purpose,’” says the…
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GATINEAU – Despite the majority’s decision today to stick to the August 31, 2011 deadline where all over-the-air TV transmitters in Canada have to switch from analog to digital, commissioner Suzanne Lamarre echoed what many in the industry have been thinking for a long while:
We’re not going to make that date, despite close to six years of notice the industry was given by the CRTC and that the U.S., which made its switch in 2009, has given Canada a road map to follow.
“No one can be expected to achieve the impossible. Based on the evidence on the public…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has extended the window for comments on the issue of opening up the general interest pay television genre to competition in the French-language market.
After receiving a letter from Astral that asked to reply to comments made by TVA Group Inc. in the filings, the Commission said that “given the importance of the issues raised in this proceeding”, it is appropriate to allow time for interested parties to reply.
Parties who participated in the first phase of this process may now file reply comments no later than April 20, 2010, the CRTC announced Tuesday. The reply…
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GATINEAU – Canadian content exhibition requirement for over-the-air broadcasters were lowered to 55% from 60%, and the broadcasters seem to have been given a break on spending requirements, according to the CRTC decision from proceeding 2009-411 released today.
Under the CRTC’s new group-based TV regulatory policy, the CRTC will now require Canada’s three largest English-language networks to spend at least 30% of their gross overall revenues on Canadian programming.
CTVglobemedia, Canwest, and Rogers will also be given a specific spending requirement for their OTA networks during licence renewals, but will have the flexibility to shift some of their expenditures to their specialty channels….
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OTTAWA – With the CRTC hearing on Canada’s community TV policy just over a month away, the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations (CACTUS) says that the majority of community TV channels have been transformed into regional TV networks.
After the CRTC released a list of Canada’s 139 community TV channels earlier this year, CACTUS says that a review of the channels’ program schedules found that in English Canada there are only 19 distinct programming services, in which at least half of the programming schedule is produced locally. The rest replay programming produced primarily in larger…
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