TORONTO – The only all-HDTV broadcaster in the country, High Fidelity HDTV, has added a new partner in merchant bank C.A. Bancorp.
Four-year-old Hi Fi HDTV has offers four channels, Rush HD, Equator HD, Oasis HD and Treasure HD, which are carried on Bell ExpressVu and certain other carriers like Source Cable and SaskTel’s MAX. The company has had some trouble gaining carriage on large cable operators as they are instead holding back slices of bandwidth for existing analog specialty channels that haven’t yet but may soon make the switch to high definition.
The $4 million dollar investment by…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Earlier this year, after having been told by the federal government to rely on market forces and deregulate as much as possible, the Commission asked the telecom industry to help it prioritize.
After receiving submissions from cable companies and telcos and a few others, the Commission said Wednesday that a review of general tariff bundling rules and requirements for market trials was the consensus top priority and it issued a public notice on the matter, intending to make a decision as soon as possible.
"The Commission is of the view that the onus is on parties who…
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NEW YORK – We might see a cable petition to the CRTC soon to add what will be the newest business channel to the eligible satellite services list here in Canada.
According to a report in Multichannel News, News Corp. will launch the Fox Business Network, a spin-off of Fox News, on October 15th. The story says the company has already reached carriage deals with Comcast, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV and Charter Communications and will launch to 30 million subscribers.
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MONTREAL – "Looking at the performance of our divisions, the television group recorded very strong growth for the quarter with subscriber-related revenues up 9% and advertising revenues increasing by 13% over the same period last year," said Astral Media president and CEO Ian Greenberg in today’s press release on the company’s third quarter financial peformance.
Consolidated net earnings for the first nine months of fiscal 2007, ended May 31st, increased by 9% over last year, rising to $93.1 million ($1.76 per basic share). Consolidated net earnings for the third quarter increased by 8% over the same quarter last year,…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – John Traversy and Paul Godin have been promoted at the CRTC.
Traversy is the new director general, consumer affairs, policy and telemarketing while Godin is now director general, competition, costing and tariffs, telecommunications. Both appointments are the result of a competitive process and are effective immediately and both men had been serving in those roles but only as acting directors.
Traversy and Godin have spent many years at the Commission. Traversy came to the telecom side after years in the Commission’s broadcasting sector and had been director, strategic research and economic analysis in the industry analysis, economics…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Offering local telephone service just might be working out for Canadian cable operators.
For anyone paying attention to the increasingly positive results for Canadian cable operators of late, the CRTC’s figures on the industry, released today, will come as no surprise.
Total revenues for cable companies passed $6 billion in 2006, a 12% increase over 2005. Subscribers also grew and profits before interest and taxes (PBIT) for cable companies totalled $1.4 billion in 2006, and the PBIT margin was 22.92%.
However, within the report itself on the Commission’s site, comparisons from year to year are not…
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TORONTO – As long as it doesn’t mean opening up the border to American cable channels, Corus Entertainment president and CEO John Cassaday says he’s okay with the CRTC dumping its policy of one specialty channel per genre.
In a conference call this afternoon with financial analysts discussing the company’s strong third quarter results, Cassaday touched on the company’s positioning with several regulatory proceedings under way.
"Our view is Canadian competition is fine and will improve the system," said Cassaday. He added he is opposed to allowing American channels in because they will not be subject to the same…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – With a number of important, high profile files in front of the Commission, and one long-time CRTC staffer headed towards retirement, Scott Hutton, associate executive director of broadcasting announced some people moves on Friday.
Nick Ketchum, the Commission’s senior director of television policy and applications, is considering retirement but has agreed to stay on through the end of the year to lead the Diversity of Voices proceeding as well as to help address ongoing Canadian Television Fund (CTF) issues. He will continue to report to Hutton as senior director, broadcasting policy.
However, “for both succession planning…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Remember 1997? Almost nobody had the Internet and even fewer had satellite TV. Digital cable barely existed. VOD was a lab engineers dream. HD was nowhere to be found and PVR still only meant player value ranking.
Tier III, with such brands as The Score, HGTV, History Television, and Teletoon, launched that fall. Titanic was the top-grossing film. Worldcom and MCI had announced their $37 billion dollar merger (which, of course, failed spectacularly and helped marked years of doom for telecom and related stocks), and we were all glued to our news channels for a time that…
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TORONTO – The OMNI brand will live on in Vancouver after all. Rogers Media announced today that it will buy the city’s multicultural station, Channel M, from Multivan.
The acquisition of Channel M will significantly expand Rogers’ ethnic television operations into the rather diverse lower Vancouver mainland and Vancouver Island markets, which are home to three million residents.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The station will copy Rogers’ successful multicultural stations in Toronto, branded OMNI. Once the deal is done, Channel M will become OMNI. Right now, Rogers owns an OMNI-branded station in Vancouver, but it…
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