WITH THE FOCUS OF the TV and telecom industry in Ottawa this week for the TV Policy Review hearing, we figure any Tuesday Interview subject would probably get lost in the myriad stories we are providing all week long from our perch inside the CRTC’s Gatineau conference room.
The Tuesday Interview, with SaskTel CEO Robert Watson, will return next week.
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THE CRTC’s TELEVISION POLICY Review hearing, which gets under way this morning with the CBC facing the commissioners, will have everyone involved in the Canadian TV industry on tenterhooks for months (like it hasn’t already!).
The Ceeb will be followed today by TQS, then CanWest Global and CTV.
While fee-for-carriage will overshadow much of the discussion over the next week-and-a-half or so, of course we at Cartt.ca know there’s far more to this hearing than that. The overall effects of new media will be a dominant topic, as will important issues like advertising flexibility, high definition transition solutions, what…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – There just isn’t enough cash in the system for conventional broadcasters to convert to digital television, representatives from CBC and TQS told the CRTC today.
And the only way free up some resources to rectify that is a fee for carriage model.
CBC/Radio-Canada’s president and CEO Robert Rabinovitch, EVP of CBC Television, Richard Stursberg; EVP of French Services Sylvain Lafrance; VP and CTO Ray Carnovale; and VP strategy and business development Michel Tremblay, were part of a the Corp.’s panel in front of the Commission this morning.
All of the CBC’s funds are tied up in producing…
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OTTAWA – While the broadcasters who air their work were facing the Commission, Canadian actors descended on Ottawa today, too, to talk about what they see as a "drama crisis" in Canadian television.
Day one of the CRTC’s TV Policy Review hearing is to feature CBC, TQS, CanWest Global and CTV, but ACTRA, the actors union, wanted to be heard on the first day as well as they want to make sure the Commission protects their jobs.
"Our culture defines us as a nation yet we can’t hear or see ourselves when regulations encourage Canadian broadcasters to show American…
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FEE-FOR-CARRIAGE will happen.
There. I said it. I don’t like it and sure don’t want to pay it, but I’ve come to believe – thanks to my talks and travels this year with folks from all sides of the issue – that in some form, the CRTC is going to grant the conventional broadcasters’ demand for more money from Canadians as additional compensation for the content they deliver.
"On the face of it, it’s a bizarre idea," Rogers vice-chairman Phil Lind told me recently. "(Consumers) get nothing extra, they just have to pay five dollars more."
True enough, but…
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NEXT WEEK IN OTTAWA, TV broadcasters will tell their regulator, the CRTC, that they want fewer rules and more ways to make money. They will raise the alarm about how difficult it is these days to make money from traditional advertising because of all of the competition for eyeballs coming from new-fangled media, like the Internet, pay TV, and cell phones. They will plead for measures to help them climb back from merely profitable to very profitable.
And they may well get their way. After all, they have powerful friends in Ottawa. In fact, the minister responsible for broadcasting…
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REGINA – SaskTel is the first ILEC to announce its intention to take full advantage of deregulated access-independent VOIP with WebCall.
As reported here, access independent VoIP service, such as SaskTel’s WebCall service (which the CRTC has said qualifies), will no longer be regulated by the CRTC in terms of the approval of rates and conditions of service.
Today, days after the two largest cable operators in the province made their own voice over IP launch announcements for Saskatoon and Regina, the provincially-owned telco announced that its WebCall Basic service is now available in Regina, Prince…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Jim Pattison Broadcast Group’s $15.75 million purchase of O.K. Radio’s Vancouver Island stations was approved by the CRTC today.
As first reported in May by Cartt.ca, O.K.’s owners, Rogers Charest and Stu Morton, are looking to retire – and are also awaiting CRTC approval for the sale of the company’s Alberta stations to Rogers Media.
Pattison has purchased from O.K. 100.3 The Q! The Island’s Rock (CKKQ-FM, playing classic and new rock) and The Zone @ 91.3 (CJZN-FM, with a modern rock format) as well as their retransmitters and transitional digital radio licenses.
The purchase is…
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MONTREAL – The CRTC today approved a quartet of AM-to-FM station flips for Corus Radio.
CKRS (Saguenay), CHLT (Sherbrooke), CHLN (Trois-Rivières) and CJRC (Gatineau) – all news/talk stations – will now be available on the FM band. Corus Québec had filed its original application for this change in July. The stations will be available on FM in the spring of 2007.
CKRS will go from 590AM to 98.3 FM, CHLT from 630 to 102.1, CHLN from 550 to 106.9 and CJRC from 1150 to 104.7.
"Each one of these four stations plays an essential role in its community -…
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KENORA – "Thank you for choosing Shaw" is the new way to answer the phones this week at the former Norcom Communications.
The $13.5 million deal to purchase the cable company serving about 6,000 customers in Kenora, Ont., and area was completed this week (that’s approximately $2,250 per subscriber).
Shaw also took on ownership of broadcast outlet CJBN-TV in the deal and will pay out over $110,000 in CRTC-mandated "tangible benefits" even though the station has been far from profitable for a number of years and that, according to Commission filings by Shaw, the company assigned no value to…
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