BANFF – Federal Heritage Minister Melanie Joly, as she has done for each of the last three years, delivered the opening keynote address at this year’s Banff World Media Festival and while in large part it was political self-congratulation for having reversed 10 years of cuts by the previous Conservative government, it was also an ample response to those in the industry who persist with the query, “what exactly has Joly done?”
Turns out she’s done a fair bit… not so much on substantive policy but quite a bit on the expenditure side.
Joly reminded delegates that last year at Banff…
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TORONTO – The Directors Guild of Canada (DGC) has promoted Dave Forget to its national executive director effective July 1st, replacing Brian Baker who will take on the role of senior advisor at the Guild’s Montreal office.
Forget (pictured) first joined the Guild in 2015, following a 14-year career with Telefilm. Prior to that, he held various management positions in film distribution, including at Red Sky Entertainment, 20th Century Fox and Alliance Atlantis Releasing.
“We are thrilled that Dave Forget has agreed to lead our staff at the Guild,” said DGC president Tim Southam, in the announcement. “In his three years…
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TORONTO – Rogers Communications confirmed today it has hired former Apple Canada senior managing director Brent Johnston to be president, Rogers Wireless.
He stepped down from his position at Apple last week and starts at Rogers on Monday. Johnston is rather familiar with Rogers CEO Joe Natale, having worked under Natale (when Natale was Telus' second in command and then CEO) for 11 years as VP channel marketing, VP mobility solutions and SVP consumer marketing. Johnston left for Apple in February of 2016.
Bringing Johnston in is the headline of a bit of an executive shift where Phil Hartling, who had…
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TORONTO – Randy Lennox says he promised when first joining Bell Media from Universal Music Canada not to "do change for change's sake."
But scale for scale's sake?
Bulking up by bringing top U.S. premium brands like HBO, Starz, Showtime, Bloomberg and iHeartRadio into Bell Media's Canadian content tent has made size a strategy at the Toronto-based media titan. "We are committed to becoming the Canadian custodian of scalable world brands,” Bell Media CEO Lennox told Cartt.ca on Thursday ahead of his Upfront presentation in Toronto.
But the focus at Bell Media isn't on bulkiness, or even synergies, but on leveraging new…
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WITH THE REVIEW OF the Broadcasting Act (Telecom and Radiocom, too) now under way, as was announced Tuesday, we’re all very anxious to hear what Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly will have to say about it this weekend when she addresses the Banff International Media Fest (Cartt.ca will have a reporter in the room, of course).
Now, since we’re looking at at least another year of discussion and debate, the best course of action to solve such tricky and complex policy challenges is to ask (and answer) the right questions in the right order – and right now….
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TORONTO – Telecom companies are eager to leverage the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to process big data, improve operations and increase revenue, and it isn’t as new as we think it is.
AI is already used in various ways such as automating customer service inquiries, routing customers to the proper agent and routing prospects with buying intent directly to salespeople. However, the massive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) and the exabytes of big data being produced thanks to connected everything has renewed interest in how AI can provide real value to that data.
AI has the ability to fix…
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TORONTO—As might be expected, Canadian telecom executives are already choosing up sides for the forthcoming battle over the CTRC's proposals for reshaping how the feds regulate and tax traditional and new media across the country.
That much was evident at the Canadian Telecom Summit here late Tuesday. Speaking during the annual "Regulatory Blockbuster" panel moderated by Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O'Brien, execs representing industry incumbents and upstarts battled it out over the Commission's new recommendations to "develop better regulatory approaches that engage all audio and video services and for each to participate," producing plenty of verbal fireworks.
Generally backing the…
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TORONTO – Rogers, Telus and SaskTel were quick to endorse Connecting Families, the new initiative designed to help make the Internet affordable to low income Canadians, announced Wednesday by Innovation, Science and Economic Development minister Navdeep Bains at the Canadian Telecom Summit.
Connecting Families will invest $13.2 million over five years, starting in 2017-2018. For $10 per month, up to 220,000 qualifying households will receive an Internet package of no less than 10 Mbps download speeds (or the fastest available) and a minimum of 100 GB of data usage each month, with no equipment or installation fees. Families must…
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TORONTO – We’ve oft been in audiences covering dreary, news-free ministerial speeches. The Navdeep Bains keynote to the 2018 Canadian Telecom Summit today in Toronto was not that.
The Innovation, Science and Economic Development minister came with a crisp, fully loaded speech which satisfied some important needs for which many of the Canadian telecom gathering’s delegates have been clamoring (and he didn’t say “middle class families” once).
An issue which Summit co-founder Mark Goldberg and others have long been hounding various governments about has been the lack of a national, co-ordinated program to help connect low income families to the Internet….
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OTTAWA – The federal government today officially launched its promised review of the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Acts with a seven member panel of thinkers and experts who will also look at updating the Radiocommunications Act.
(So, it's not just Joly's panel, as we had surmised earlier...)
“New technology, like streaming services, has changed the way that Canadians connect with each other, do business and discover, access and consume content. Now more than ever, Canadians go online. To keep up with these changes we must modernize our legislative framework so that Canadian artists, artisans, businesses, consumers and broadcasters…
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