OTTAWA – Bell Canada won’t be making public data to support its claim that over-the-air fee-for-carriage rate hikes will prompt subscribers to drop its ExpressVu service.
In a letter, dated April 25, to the CRTC, Bell’s regulatory affairs chief Mirko Bibic said it won’t file the data because of its “great commercial sensitivity’’ and “the Commission’s disinclination to accept it on a confidential basis,’’ even though the CRTC Chairman Konrad von Finckenstein said Bell could file the data in confidence.
Bell noted that the “disaggregated monthly data’’ “could be of assistance’’ to the Commission, but refused to have information…
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OTTAWA – The Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) says Bell Canada’s response to the CRTC over the organization’s complaints of traffic shaping, or throttling, “confirms that the association’s arguments of wrong-doing by the country’s largest phone company… were well-founded,” reads a press release.
CAIP’s original Part VII Application was filed earlier this month in response to certain traffic shaping measures that Bell Canada is applying to local access and transport services it supplies to competitors on a regulated basis. “Independent competitors interconnect with Bell in order to gain access to their end-user through the ‘final mile’ of access…
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MONTREAL and GATINEAU – BCE Inc. and the investor group led by Teachers’ Private Capital, the private investment arm of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Providence Equity Partners Inc., Madison Dearborn Partners, LLC and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity, today announced that the CRTC has agreed to extend the deadline for the filing of documents relating to the proposed acquisition of BCE to May 12, 2008.
"We continue to work with BCE to meet all the requirements for closing by the end of the second quarter," said Jim Leech, President and CEO of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
The…
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GATINEAU – Of all the submissions we’ve heard over the past three weeks, Channel Zero’s boiled the issues down very well, kicking of its oral remarks on Wednesday.
Cal Millar, vice-president and general manager of the company which owns Silver Screen Classics and Movieola said he believes the hearing is about Canadian programming and the fact that the consumer doesn’t really care about all the machinations going on within the CRTC or any of the broadcast and distribution companies.
“Canadians don’t say to themselves: ‘I want to spend money on cable or satellite’,” explained Millar. “They say ‘I want…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC today released financial results for the Canadian specialty, pay, pay-per-view television and video-on-demand services industry, which took in $2.7 billion in total revenues last year. This is an increase of 9.1% over the $2.5 billion in total revenues achieved by the industry in 2006.
Profits before interest and taxes (PBIT) rose by 13%, coming in at $647.1 million in 2007, and the PBIT margin grew to 23.75% in 2007 from 22.92% in 2006.
The total revenues of $2.7 billion were generated from the following sources: $1.2 billion from subscribers of cable distribution services; $574.8 million…
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QUEBEC CITY – Remstar Corp., the future owner of the troubled Quebec TV network, TQS, caught its news staff by surprise Wednesday, announcing it intention to eliminate its entire news programming by September.
The move would eliminate 271 jobs, but put the network back on the road to financial health, officials of Remstar and the interim management committee said. The cuts would leave TQS with 210 permanent employees.
Remstar, owned by brothers Maxime and Julien Rémillard, will be applying to the CRTC in the coming days for a transfer of license, and will at the same time ask that…
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GATINEAU – Sounding an awful lot like they’d be very interested in morphing one or both of LeafsTV and RaptorsTV into a more general purpose sports channel, Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment brass told the CRTC today that the sports TV genre in Canada is plenty strong – and able to withstand unfettered competition.
Given the myriad sports channels already in existence and the massive amount of sports content available on the web, MLSE’s COO Tom Anselmi and SVP broadcast Chris Hebb said the company’s pair of team-branded category two digi-nets must be able to stretch beyond their narrow…
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GATINEAU – Shaw Communications is so opposed to any type of fee-for-carriage for conventional broadcasters that it wouldn’t even consider a hypothetical question on the matter yesterday.
During the hearing into the policies governing broadcast distribution undertakings and specialty services, which wrap up today in Gatineau, commissioners have been asking such questions of intervenors for the entire hearing, forcing companies and their executives to ponder “what if” scenarios from genre protection to a shrunken basic cable package.
But clearly, the most contentious issue facing the CRTC policymakers from this hearing is the potential for a fee-for-carriage being paid to…
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WHERE IS JIM SHAW? is what CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein wanted to know Wednesday morning when he moseyed into the hearing room in Gatineau and spied the Shaw Communications panel, minus its CEO, facing him.
It’s more than a fair question. The Shaw Communications CEO has lobbed several virtual grenades into Ottawa of late, most notably challenging the existence of the Canadian Television Fund throughout 2007, and then declining to appear at the hearing into the CTF earlier this year – telling a newspaper that since von Finckenstein wasn’t leading that hearing, it amounted to a Commission…
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GATINEAU – Canada’s largest media union had some harsh words for broadcasters and the CRTC itself at today’s hearing into BDU and specialty services policies.
Broadcasters must be held to their commitments to stronger local news if the CRTC decides to make subscribers pay more for local TV stations, said Peter Murdoch, vice-president, media, for the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP).
“Lack of oversight, transparency and accountability in the current system has let broadcasters across Canada downgrade or eliminate their local news operations whenever they want,” Murdoch said. “So if the CRTC intends to ask cable…
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