OTTAWA – CPAC will carry live, on-line coverage of next week’s CRTC hearings on group licensing for broadcasters and fee for carriage for local conventional TV stations.
Starting Monday, the parliamentary channel will stream the proceedings on its website www.CPAC.ca. The hearing will be broadcast on the television channel at a later date.
And, of course, Cartt.ca will be there too with daily reports.
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OTTAWA – The Canadian Film and Television Production Association is urging Industry Minister Tony Clement to be “vigilant” and “not submit to the current pressures being exerted” in his review of Globalive Wireless.
In letter dated November 9, the CFTPA said that Minister Clement has its “strong support for holding firm to the current Canadian ownership and control requirements in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors”.
“We believe that the current ownership and control rules are a positive force in the Canadian economy”, reads the letter, which is signed by president and CEO Norm Bolen. “They are necessary to ensure that Canadians…
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OTTAWA – In a letter to incumbent telcos and others involved in the recent review of Globalive’s ownership by the CRTC, Industry Minister Tony Clement has asked for even more information as he examines the Commission’s call on the prospective new wireless entrant.
On October 29 the CRTC decided that since Egypt-based Orascom Telecom owned 65% of the equity in Globalive and virtually all of the debt, that the company was not Canadian controlled and could not operate as a telecom company in Canada. Our Telecom Act says our telcos, cablecos and broadcasters have to be majority Canadian-owned and…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has approved the transfer of CHEK TV’s assets from Canwest to a numbered company owned by station employees, a local investment group and the Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union.
In a decision on Monday, the CRTC identified the purchase price for the transaction as $2.00. It also noted that the station “is currently losing approximately $12 million per year and has not shown any marked improvement in profitability over the past three years”.
The Commission also renewed the station’s broadcasting licence through August 31, 2016, though said that given the specific context of the renewal…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has received over 15,000 submissions – and counting – on the issues of fee for carriage and the digital transition, after encouraging Canadians to take part in the public consultation process that ended Monday.
According to the broadcaster backed coalition ‘Local TV Matters’, support for local TV has been “unprecedented”. And a CRTC source says those cataloguing the submissions are working nearly 24/7.
“We are overwhelmed by the outpouring of clear and unequivocal support for our position," said Paul Sparkes, EVP of corporate affairs for CTVglobemedia, in a statement on Wednesday. "Canadian consumers were not fooled, they understood…
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CLEARWATER, B.C. – Not all Canadian cable companies are against the broadcasters’ receiving a fee for their conventional television stations.
Tiny Raftview Communications, which serves the towns of Clearwater, B.C. (pop. 5,000, about 120 kms north of Kamloops) and Barriere (pop. 3,400, and about 60 kms farther north) with digital cable, high definition and high speed Internet has come out against its cable compatriots on the issue of fee for carriage.
“It is absolutely unreasonable that these broadcasters receive nothing for their service,” company president Paul Caissie writes in his submission to the CRTC for the December 7th hearing (2009-614)…
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TORONTO – A trio of independent broadcasters is urging the CRTC not to introduce a fee-for-carriage regime without also taking steps to offset the potential impact on their business.
The S-VOX group of companies, Stornoway Communications and Fairchild Television have banded together to ask the Commission to consider “the challenges” facing small, independent broadcasters, and to “rebalance regulatory support within the broadcasting system to ensure a more level playing field”.
In their joint submission, the independents predict that the BDUs “will inevitably take steps to recover the costs of fee-for-carriage”, perhaps by reducing the wholesale fees paid to their specialty services,…
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TORONTO – Not to be left out of the current fee-for-carriage debate, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting has asked the CRTC to consider re-regulating cable’s basic rates, and to ensure that any signal compensation costs can not be passed through to subscribers.
In a submission to the Commission earlier this week, the self described independent watchdog for Canadian programming also proposed that satellite distributors be allowed to charge FFC costs with no mark-up until such time as they achieve a 10% PBIT.
“This compensation should be allocated nationally based on population and linguistic composition”, the submission reads.
The group also proposes that the…
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TORONTO – Phil Lind delights in telling everyone that Rogers Television, the big cableco’s community TV arm, is 100% local and 100% Canadian “unlike the big broadcasters who say they’re ‘intensely local’,” he said.
The executive vice-president, regulatory and vice-chairman of Rogers Communications launched Rogers Television 40 years ago and hosted a small gathering of journalists Tuesday to talk about the milestone – and given the hub-bub over local TV – to also use the little gathering to note that the cable community channels have been intensely local for a long time.
“We cover the issues the big broadcasters don’t have…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has received nearly 15,000 submissions – and counting – on the issues of fee for carriage and the digital transition after encouraging Canadians to take part in the public consultation process that ended Monday.
According to the broadcaster backed coalition ‘Local TV Matters’, support for local TV has been “unprecedented”.
“We are overwhelmed by the outpouring of clear and unequivocal support for our position," said Paul Sparkes, EVP of corporate affairs for CTVglobemedia, in a statement on Wednesday. "Canadian consumers were not fooled, they understood the issues, and we can’t thank them enough."
The group said that more than…
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