Regulator said it believes Corus’s Global should receive ILNF funding
By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC is asking the public whether it should modify the Independent Local News Fund (ILNF) to expand eligibility, ensure news quality, and whether it should favour recipients operating in remote and underserved communities.
The commission launched Tuesday the consultation on revisiting the ILNF, which was spawned in 2016. It follows the regulator’s decision, as part of the Online Streaming Act, to force foreign and standalone online platforms to allocate five per cent of their prior year’s Canadian revenues toward content funds, including 1.5 per cent to the ILNF,…
Continue Reading
The CRTC has invited members of official language minority communities to participate in a CRTC Interconnection Steering Committee (CISC) Emergency Services Working Group (ESWG) study related to improving access to 911 services in both official languages.
Following incidents reported in January where 911 calls from francophone residents of Quebec were answered in English, the CRTC tasked the ESWG to come up with recommendations to ensure 911 calls routed to intermediary call centres are handled in the caller’s preferred official language.
The ESWG is to provide the commission with a report with its recommendations by Feb….
Continue Reading
The CRTC is prepared to provide the Kativik Regional Government of northern Quebec roughly $79.4 million – the amount it asked for – from the Broadband Fund to build undersea fibre transport infrastructure and five new points of presence.
The project will serve five Inuit communities in the north of the province – Aupaluk, Kangiqsualujjuaq, Kangirsuk, Quaqtaq, and Tasiujaq – encompassing roughly 707 households. The build will also connect 42 anchor institutions, such as schools and health care centres, and will link all communities in the entire Nunavik region.
The transport infrastructure will allow last-mile service providers to offer service to…
Continue Reading
The CRTC is asking Rogers to explain how the recent increase of its service set-up fee from $60 to $70 on Rogers and Fido plans is consistent with the federal government’s recent amendments to the Telecommunications Act introduced this spring in Budget 2024.
Division 37 of Bill C-69, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 16, 2024, which received royal assent on June 20, contains a prohibition stating, “A telecommunications service provider must not charge a fee to a subscriber that is related to the activation or modification of a telecommunications service…
Continue Reading
Media company said its application serves to show urgency of situation
By Ahmad Hathout
Blue Ant Media has filed a Part 1 application requesting that the CRTC reduce its required spending on programs of national interest, citing a stranglehold on its ability to spend money on content that its audiences want to watch.
In the two-page filing, dated June 20 but posted to the CRTC website Thursday, the media company asks that it be allowed to put five, instead of 13.5, per cent of its previous year’s revenues into PNI, which it said “force broadcasters to spend their production budgets on certain…
Continue Reading
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced Tuesday the appointment of Drew Olsen as vice chair and CEO of the Copyright Board of Canada for a five-year term, starting Aug. 26.
In this position, Olsen will lead the work of the Copyright Board as well as supervise and direct board staff. He succeeds Nathalie Théberge, who was recently appointed as the CRTC’s vice chair of broadcasting for a five-year term that began in April.
Olsen is currently associate director general of the audiovisual branch at Canadian Heritage. While at the department, he has held other leadership…
Continue Reading
The CRTC last week approved an implementation plan from incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) Westport Telephone Company Limited, operating as WTC Communications, for local competition by Bell Canada in the exchange of Westport, Ont.
Given there is no other competitive local exchange carriers currently operating in WTC Communications’ local interconnection region, the ILEC said it does not already have the necessary processes in place. In its implementation plan, it asked for 60 days to file competitor services tariffs related to local network interconnection in Westport once the commission approved its implementation plan. It further proposed that Bell…
Continue Reading
The CRTC has told Rogers in a letter it plans to publish the full Xona Partners report on the cable giant’s July 2022 major service outage, after receiving letters from public interest groups requesting disclosure of the full text of the report.
On July 4, the CRTC posted an executive summary of the Xona report, which detailed the results of an independent assessment of the Rogers network architecture for reliability and resiliency, as well as the processes in place at Rogers to manage network changes and respond to network incidents like…
Continue Reading
Media company says it is confident in slate of rebranded and new content after losing Discovery rights
By Ahmad Hathout
Corus Entertainment executives said Monday that the pure-play media company is expecting to make further cuts to full-time positions, which will bring the total by the end of August to almost 800, or 25 per cent, since the beginning of its fiscal year in September.
“Our board of directors has given us a clear mandate to decisively right-size the business and create a more sustainable future,” John Gossling, co-CEO of Corus and chief financial officer, said on a third quarter conference call…
Continue Reading
The Canada Media Fund (CMF) on Monday invited industry members and organizations to help shape its 2024-2027 Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) Strategy by sharing their insights at in-person forums or via virtual sessions during the month of July.
EDIA community members can attend in-person sessions in Toronto (July 17), Vancouver (July 24) or Montreal (July 30). The meetings can also be joined virtually on Zoom, according to information on the registration form here. Industry organizations are invited to attend virtual sessions on July 29 in English and on July 31 in…
Continue Reading
