TORONTO – The idea of “TV anywhere” has not yet been realized in Canada, but it’s what consumers will demand very soon, according to industry experts who spoke during a special panel titled “The Revolution of TV: Content Anywhere and Anyhow” at the Canadian Telecom Summit on Tuesday afternoon.
“There are a lot of indications that we’re about to go through a major change,” said David Purdy, senior vice-president of content for Rogers Communications. “Today, we’re in the middle of a revolution, but it’s nascent.”
The panel discussion’s moderator, Peter Miller, chair of Interactive Ontario, quoted some statistics from CBC’s Spring…
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TORONTO – Wind Mobile CEO Tony Lacavera told folks at the Canadian Telecom Summit this week that sure, with the federal government denying the bid from Telus to take over Mobilicity he’d be interested in talking about buying the struggling wireless firm, but there was another thing he said that caught our attention.
Namely, while Lacavera said thank you to the federal government for its announcements on spectrum transfers Tuesday, he also had some advice for the feds as well: Lift all foreign ownership restrictions in telecom, then let Bell and Telus merge and go international.
“We…
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TORONTO – Just a day after Shaw Media announced its new partnership with Twitter’s Amplify program, Bell Media today announced its own partnership with the social media juggernaut that will use metrics to examine the relationship between audience engagement and Twitter activity.
Bell Media, which made the announcement ahead of today’s “upfront” presentation of its new fall schedule, said the research will also focus on the social TV behaviour of Canadian viewers and the return on investment of social TV initiatives. “We're excited to continually expand our presence in the social media space through the…
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TORONTO – Low-cost wireless provider Public Mobile said today it has been acquired by Thomvest Seed Capital Inc., the Toronto-based investment vehicle of Peter J. Thomson, and Cartesian Capital, a New York-based private equity firm. Financial terms were not disclosed.
While Public Mobile is privately held, it is thought that the two companies were already significant shareholders before this announcement. Thomson is chairman of Thomson family investment company Woodbridge, which has held various telecom and media investments in Canada over the years and the Thomsons, as many will know, are Canada’s richest family and own assets worth tens of billions…
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TORONTO – “Ladies and gentlemen, you know better than anyone that wireless devices are at the very core of our lives – enabling us to work, engage in social media, play games, watch movies, get directions, buy products and so much more, including financial transactions,” CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais said to Canadian Telecom Summit delegates Tuesday morning.
Turning to his overarching theme of making sure Canadian citizens are at the very heart of what he does, Blais added: “Your products and services have become an extension of our jobs, our families, our personalities. They have become essential to achieving our…
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TORONTO – Cell tower sharing remains a white hot topic for wireless competitors and the issue raised its head Tuesday morning during the Canadian Telecom Summit’s annual regulatory blockbuster panel, moderated again this year by Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien.
Although mandated tower sharing was included in the 2008 AWS spectrum auction rules – as it will be for next year’s 700MHz spectrum auction – the problems for new wireless entrants are the growing costs to share tower space and that access rules are not adhered to by the three incumbents, said Ed Antecol, vice-president of regulatory affairs and…
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TORONTO – Canadians need to dream big and to promote their achievements in order for pioneering companies to successfully attract capital investment that in turn will help the country build an innovation economy. That was the message from a panel of industry experts who spoke Wednesday morning at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto.
“We need to thump our chest. We need to own the podium for the next version of the economy,” said John Weigelt, national technology officer for Microsoft Canada. “We need to put out that goal and promote that goal so that funding can come here.”
Canadians overall…
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TORONTO – There is no shortage of business models to choose from when it comes to optimizing opportunities in a converged world. The challenge is choosing which business model to use, said Bell Canada’s senior vice-president of marketing, Heather Tulk, during a panel discussion on Monday afternoon at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto.
“One of the hardest things for the industry in the next number of years is going to be selecting from among the opportunities, whether that’s banking, machine-to-machine, mobile payments, near-field communication, location-based services, advertising data monetization, big data – the opportunities for new ways to enable…
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OTTAWA – Late Monday the media were provided with the following announcement from the office of Industry Minister Christian Paradis: “The Honourable Christian Paradis, Minister of Industry, will make an important announcement regarding Canada's wireless telecommunications sector.”
It will happen at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning at the Minister’s Ottawa office. Please check out Cartt.ca then to see just what it that announcement will be. Will it be a statement on the spectrum transfer process? A 700 MHz auction delay? We’ll have to wait and see. The Minister had been scheduled to speak at the Canadian Telecom Summit Wednesday, but he…
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OTTAWA – The federal government said Tuesday that Telus can not buy Mobilicity right now and also pushed out the date of the auction of 700 MHz wireless spectrum to January of 2014.
Mobilicity’s network is built with AWS spectrum that was set aside for new competitors in 2008 and part of the rules of that set aside meant the spectrum could not be transferred to an incumbent for five years, a period which does not expire until February 2014. "Our government has been clear that spectrum set aside for new entrants was not intended to…
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