TORONTO – The Canadian cable industry asked for the U.S. version of Discovery HD in February of 2003 but made little progress with its request with the CRTC.
However, a decision last Friday, as reported by www.cartt.ca, licenses Discovery HD Canada – and owner CTV Specialty said today that it will launch, ASAP.
CTV Specialty Television Inc. (a subsidiary of CTV Inc.) and US-based Discovery Communications announced Tuesday that their joint venture application to the CRTC for a new High Definition (HD) specialty channel – Discovery HD – has been approved. Expected to launch before the end of 2005,…
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MONTREAL – Bell Digital Voice is now available in the Greater Montreal Area, the company announced this morning.
Already offered in Toronto for $40 a month, the service is being progressively rolled out across Québec and Ontario.
In Montreal, the offer is $35 a month. Bell has faced significant pressure in Montreal with Videotron’s $16 a month residential telephony offer. The MSO said in August that it had surpassed 75,000 customers and were adding 4,000 a week, which means the company is over or nearly 100,000 VOIP subscribers, most of which would be telephony customers taken from Bell.
As…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU –Teletoon Retro, D.I.Y. and Nostalgie are just three of the 14 new category two digital specialty channels approved by the CRTC Friday.
A few of the new licenses will sound familiar (D.I.Y., Teletoon Retro, Humour) because their owners had held similar digital licenses when they were granted in 2000, but let them lapse as they decided not to launch right away.
One would think that reviving the licenses would mean the channels will launch soon, too.
The full list and links are below:
Teletoon Retro (English)
Teletoon Retro (French)
Vista The Virtual Window
D.I.Y. Television…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC Thursday granted a category two digital specialty service license to Astral Media for French-language speed channel Télé-Vitesse.
Astral’s application proposes a service that would be devoted to speed – on land, on the water and in the air – and vehicles: automobiles, motorcycles, snowmobiles, trains, boats, planes and more.
Astral proposed to air magazine programs, documentaries, dramas, reality television shows and, on occasion, speed-sports competitions and segments on automobiles and the technologies that make them possible.
www.crtc.gc.ca
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The CRTC told all companies selling voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) service that they must be diligent when it comes to telling customers what they can and can’t do with 911.
Today’s CRTC edict requires all local voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service providers in Canada to provide specific notification to current and prospective customers regarding the availability, characteristics and limitations of their 911 and Enhanced 911 (E911) service. All local VoIP service providers will have to implement these requirements within 90 days of this decision.
Some of the notification requirements are:
* VoIP 911 service has…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Look for a local telephony price battle in Montreal.
The CRTC took a first step towards local telephony deregulation on Thursday when it granted – on an interim basis – Bell Canada’s request to price its voice over IP service differently in different regions. Until now, if telcos wanted to drop prices, it had to drop prices across its entire footprint and could not target certain markets.
However, in Quebec, MSO Videotron is offering local telephony for as little as $16 a month and Bell is losing thousands of customers per week.
Bell doesn’t face similar pricing…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Broadcaster Crossroads Television (CITS) will stay on basic cable on Videotron’s Quebec-Ontario border systems, the CRTC told the company today.
Videotron wanted to distribute the Christian broadcast channel as a digital basic service to its Gatineau, Buckingham, Thurso and Montebello, Quebec – and Rockland, Ontario, systems.
CTS said it would submit to digital basic distribution, so long as Videotron wanted to do it province-wide.
The Quebecor Media-owned cable company, however, added that moving it to digital would free up network space to other specialties and new services.
“Videotron noted that CITS-TV-1, an English-language television programming undertaking devoted…
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OTTAWA – The Government of Canada Wednesday dismissed complaints filed with the Governor in Council over two CRTC decisions awarding Vancouver radio station licenses.
On July 21, 2005, the CRTC awarded a radio license to South Asian Broadcasting Corporation Inc. to operate a new commercial specialty FM (ethnic) radio station at Vancouver at 93.1 MHz aimed at the South Asian community.
The same day, it also approved an AM radio application by I.T. Productions Ltd. for a new station at 1200 kHz also targeting Vancouver’s South Asian communities.
“The decisions… were found to be consistent with the policy objectives…
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TORONTO – Thanks to a partnership agreement which dates back to the beginnings of CanWest Global’s only analog specialty service, Prime TV, Rogers Communications wants to acquire one-third ownership of the channel.
In a nutshell, Rogers provided some start-up financing and covered some operating costs for the channel leading to and after its launch in 1997. In return, RCI received a subordinated debenture from CanWest, convertible into ownership of the channel, at RCI’s option.
The company has exercised its option and plans to take 33.3% ownership of CanWest’s channel.
CanWest has applied for CRTC approval for the ownership change….
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OTTAWA – Saying the Copyright Board has now moved into cultural policy, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters has called the board’s Friday decision “astonishing.”
Rather than just approving rates based on the value of music, the panel’s decision “seeks to appropriate a cultural policy making role, and establish its own economic order for the distribution of cultural subsidies,” says the CAB today.
“It is remarkable that this panel took the liberty of criticizing Parliament itself by gratuitously condemning the legislated tariff rate that Parliament granted small broadcasters,” continues the harshly-worded (and for good reason) release.
“Unlike the CRTC, which…
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