WITHOUT A DOUBT, THE highest profile issue CRTC commissioners will tackle beginning next week’s policy hearings on broadcast distribution undertakings and specialty services is fee-for-carriage. That is, paying a new subscription fee for over-the-air broadcast stations.
As the rules now stand the regulatory bargain is such that cable and satellite and telco TV must carry conventional local TV stations low in their channel lineups and must substitute Canadian signals over top of American ones when the programming is the same. We’ve come to know that part as simultaneous substitution. In return, distributors have not ever had to pay the…
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It has been argued in the media that “Cable companies have built profitable businesses based on the exploitation of free programming supplied by local broadcasters without giving any of the proceeds back to the stations.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Over-the-air television stations receive advertising revenue and they need cable to get to more eyeballs with better pictures. Cable’s capital investment to provide the bandwidth that carries local stations costs literally billions of dollars and the broadcasters do not pay a cent for the use of this network. In addition, cable gives the broadcasters a low…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The CRTC will be questioning commercial radio station CJMS Saint-Constant over its failure to once again meet its contributions to Canadian content development.
The CRTC has added the station’s licence renewal to a May 13 public hearing at which a number of new radio licence applications will be heard, including for the Ottawa area.
The regulator notes that it appears CJMS Saint-Constant “may have failed” once again to comply with its contributions to Canadian content development for the 2006 broadcast year.
In Broadcasting Notice of Public Hearing 2008-1-2, issued Wednesday, the commission states it expects the radio…
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OTTAWA – The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) has filed an application for leave to appeal the CRTC decision’s denying the media union’s request for a public hearing into restructuring plans announced by Canwest Media Inc. last October.
Canwest is moving control and production of its television stations’ local newscasts to four broadcast centres and laying off 200 people in the process, claims CEP.
“Canwest is changing the face of Canadian broadcasting by introducing central casting, where each local television station’s local newscast is produced, packaged, assembled and transmitted from one of four broadcast centres,” said…
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INVIDI TECHNOLOGIES CEO DAVID DOWNEY has been long been dining out on John Wanamaker’s now ancient and clichéd quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
It’s been a key portion of Downey’s presentations to investors and industry folks for years. Now Wanamaker, the innovative American department store pioneer (he’s said to have invented the price tag and the “sale”) died in the 1920s, so one would think that we have progressed beyond the late retailer’s ad spend calculations over the century or so since he spoke those words….
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TORONTO – Rogers Broadcasting has finally gotten the over-the-air ethnic channel in Vancouver it coveted back in the 1990s as the CRTC on Monday approved its purchase of channel m (CHNM-TV) from Multivan Broadcast Ltd. (Broadcasting Decision 2008-72).
The transaction initially announced last July, but without the financial terms of the deal being disclosed, is expected to close on April 30.
“We are delighted with the approval by the CRTC of our acquisition of channel m. The Rogers OMNI Television group will continue to illustrate Canada’s ongoing commitment to a media landscape that reflects our multicultural and multilingual history,”…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has given its approval, subject to certain conditions, to the purchase of BCE Inc.’s broadcasting assets by the group headed by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and three U.S. private equity firms.
“The application proposed to privatize the country’s largest communications company and included significant foreign interest,” wrote CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein in the decision. “Consistent with previous decisions, we have imposed conditions to address our concerns relating to corporate governance. These conditions will ensure that control of BCE remains in Canadian hands once the transaction is completed.”
The CRTC set out six major…
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GATINEAU – At 4 p.m. today, the CRTC will announce its decision on the proposed sale of Bell Canada’s regulated assets to a private consortium led by the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan.
Three days of hearings – two in February and a half-day a few weeks later in March – were aimed at fleshing out just where control of Bell Canada’s broadcasting assets (primarily Bell ExpressVu and the minority ownership both Bell and Teachers possess in CTVglobemedia) will lie.
The law says control must remain in Canada (foreigners can’t have more than 46.7% of a telecom firm) – and…
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CRTC COMMISSIONER MICHEL MORIN apparently didn’t like much about his first CRTC hearing.
He disagreed with the companies that got the licenses (Vista Radio and Sun Country Cablevision, instead of CTV, Corus or Deep Waters Media), sharply criticized a cynical format flop ploy by the two ownership groups already in the market and said the whole process of calling for applications and hearing them isn’t transparent enough.
In a scathing dissenting opinion following this month’s decision on granting a pair of new radio station licenses, the former broadcaster unloaded on both Astral Media and Jim Pattison Broadcast for their…
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MONTREAL – Cogeco Inc. announced Tuesday that it has been entirely released, without costs, from its obligations to CIBC as guarantor of Groupe TQS, contracted on December 14, 2008.
The release of Cogeco follows the repayment by Remstar Corporation of all sums owed by Groupe TQS to CIBC, Cogeco said in a statement.
Remstar won the bidding competition for the financially-troubled Quebec TV network earlier this month, and is now in the process of finalizing details of the purchase and presenting its proposals to creditors. TQS is 60% owned by Cogeco and 40% by CTVglobemedia.
Creditors will vote on…
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