TORONTO – Quebecor will transform Sun TV into a new “hard news/straight talk” English specialty channel called Sun TV News for television audiences tired of “being exposed to dry news”, said Quebecor president and CEO of Pierre Karl Péladeau in Toronto on Tuesday morning.
In his widely anticipated announcement, Péladeau said that the new channel will be loosely based on the company’s French-language all-news specialty service LCN, which saw its ratings more than triple when it moved toward that formula three years ago. Sun TV News will replace the company’s struggling, Toronto-based over-the-air Sun TV station.
"Far too many Canadians are tuning out completely or…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has rapped eight more companies for violating the country’s national do not call list (DNCL).
An numbered Ontario company, operating as 2 The Point Global Marketing, has received a $21,000 administrative monetary penalty. After receiving a notice of violation back in January, 2 The Point argued that it had demonstrated due diligence in ensuring that numbers on the DNCL were not being called, and that the violations had occurred because of “a programming error associated with a hosted predictive dialing system”.
The CRTC disagreed and found that the company initiated seven telemarketing telecommunications on behalf of clients who were…
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TORONTO and OTTAWA – Quebecor’s rumoured new national news service could be revealed as early as Tuesday morning. Or, as we suspect, it will be a piece of a larger announcement from the broadcasting, publishing and cable giant.
What is known is that Pierre Karl Péladeau, president and CEO of Quebecor, Quebecor Media, and Sun Media is scheduled to make an announcement at the Toronto Sun’s offices in Toronto on Tuesday “in regard to new investment in Canadian media”.
A report in the Globe and Mail says that the company will invest approximately $100-million over five years on a channel…
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TORONTO – From regulations to new technology, the Olympics to his hopes that cutting the cord won’t be quite so prevalent in Canada, Bell Canada’s president of residential services Kevin Crull covered a number of topics in his closing keynote at the Canadian Telecom Summit on Tuesday and in an interview with Cartt.ca and Bloomberg afterwards.
On last week’s CRTC hearing into mandated wholesale broadband access for third party ISPs:
“What if the people who run the Olympic hockey tournament had said to our guys: ‘everyone knows your team is the favourite to win gold, plus you have home ice advantage…
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TORONTO – It was easy to see Wednesday that Tony Lacavera was really stung by the critics who decried the level of Canadian-ness of his company.
No less than seven times in his speech to the Canadian Telecom Summit did the Globalive/Wind CEO feel the need to insist upon the new wireless carrier’s Canuck bona fides.
“I won’t shy away from saying that Globalive is a Canadian company… truly a brainchild of Canadians… created by and for Canadians,” he said during his speech.
Lacavera rehashed the 2009 regulatory battles, lashing out at the incumbent operators which used every tactic in their arsenal…
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CARTT.CA RECENTLY RAN a piece on the soon to be launched Pelmorex early alert service. In this report, Cartt.ca editor Greg O’Brien stated that “the broadcast and distribution industry ignored repeated deadlines set by the CRTC to come up with its own EAS.”
This assertion is not true. Since 2007, and at the CRTC’s urging, Rogers, Bell and other industry reps worked diligently with Public Safety Canada and its partners to implement a comprehensive national public alerting system. Public Service Canada wanted a holistic multi-platform national public alerting service.
In fact, during the hearing on Pelmorex’s third application in four…
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OTTAWA – Independent producers receive little or no compensation from Canadian broadcasters for the digital rights to their programming, according to a new study released by the Canadian Film and Television Production Association (CFTPA).
The study, Towards a Framework for Digital Rights, included a survey of CFTPA members which found that more than half (56%) of respondents indicated that they did not receive any additional compensation for the digital (Internet and mobile) rights to their shows, whether in the form of an incremental licence fee or a revenue share. At the same time, the majority of respondents said that…
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WITH THE GENRE protection afforded existing specialty news channels having been set aside by the CRTC last summer, it was only a matter of time until a company put together a proposal for a new national news service to compete with the likes of CBC Newsworld, CTV News Channel and others.
According to a report in the Globe and Mail and from Canadian Press, Quebecor Media is getting behind the former communications chief for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Kory Teneycke, with an impending application to the CRTC for a license to operate a new, national news channel.
The report said the channel…
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TORONTO– Although Canada ranks highly on most international measures of PC penetration and broadband connectivity, the nation’s lagging investments in information and communications technology (ICT) are dragging down its business productivity, increasingly hurting its global competitiveness and lowering its standard of living.
That consensus emerged from telecom industry execs, academics, government officials, and other speakers during a pair of afternoon panels at the Canadian Telecom Summit on Tuesday afternoon. Despite a wide range of different perspectives and proposed solutions, the panelists generally agreed that Canadian companies must boost their ICT spending substantially to make better use of broadband technology and…
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TORONTO – Non-profit corporation Media Access Canada is hosting a private roundtable of audio-visual associations, guilds and unions at the end of this month in Ottawa, to discuss ways of strengthening Canada’s broadcasting system, it announced Tuesday.
The roundtable will include sessions on the federal government’s just-announced consultation on foreign ownership, its ongoing digital consultation and the CRTC’s 2011 licence renewals of Canada’s major broadcasting ownership groups.
"The announcement earlier this week by Industry Minister Tony Clement of another important consultation that will directly affect Canada’s cultural businesses clearly shows that non-broadcasting stakeholders must identify new ways and means of strengthening the…
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