OTTAWA – The 4th Annual Telecom Laureate Awards gala dinner and induction ceremonies will be held in the Grand Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec on October 29.
The event celebrates Canada’s telecom pioneers and innovators. It’s run by Canada’s Telecommunications Hall of Fame, an independent, not-for-profit organization whose mission is to safeguard and promote the past, present and future excellence of Canadian telecommunications.
“We are very pleased with the venue for this year’s gala,” said Hall founder Lorne Abugov. “The Museum of Civilization is a beautiful building that, similar to the Hall of Fame,…
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MONTREAL – The proposed acquisition of BCE by an investor group led by Teachers’ Private Capital has been approved, subject to a few conditions, by Industry Minister Jim Prentice, the telco announced Wednesday.
“Based on the information provided thus far and subject to the paragraphs below, Industry Canada finds that BCE Inc. would be, under the proposed structure, ‘Canadian’ within the meaning of the Radiocommunication Regulations of the Radiocommunication Act and in relation to the radiocommunication authorizations held by subsidiaries and affiliates of BCE Inc.,” states Prentice in a letter dated April 8 to Bell.
The minister writes that…
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I’VE HEARD NO END of parallels spun in attempts to explain the complex structure we call the Canadian television industry.
From cars and roads and traffic lights to water bottles and Lake Ontario. A house of cards to yarn and a sweater – and even an airplane ride and airline peanuts. Various parts of the industry are the gears in the car, the pre-and post-processed water, the air pressure inside and outside the plane. The yarn-and-sweater analogy is always “if you pull at one thread, the whole things comes apart.” I can’t repeat without a potential libel suit what…
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TORONTO – Canadians don’t trust deregulated cable and satellite TV companies to promote and deliver Canadian content on TV, and see the CRTC and the federal government as guardians of Canadian culture, states a Pollara survey conducted on behalf of some creative guilds and unions.
The survey results were released Monday, the day before the CRTC is set to start three-week-long public hearings into a new framework for broadcast distributors and specialty TV.
“Canadians have a strong sense of national identity; they want their TV programming to reflect and support that identity and values, and they look to Ottawa…
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OTTAWA – The creative community will be expressing their concerns about Bill C-10 to the Senate Standing Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce on April 10. Controversial Bill C-10 that includes provisions allowing the Canadian Heritage minister to deny tax credits to film and TV productions if they are deemed “contrary to public policy” amounts to censorship, claim most in the creative community.
Due to appear before the Senate standing committee are the Association des producteurs de films et de television du Quebec, the Canadian Film and Television Production Association, FilmOntario, the Writers Guild of Canada, the Alliance of…
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FIRST, THE GENRE PROTECTION rules established by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission consist of two distinct components, with two distinct goals. The first rule is directed at limiting the distribution in Canada of foreign services which are partly or fully competitive with licensed Canadian services.
The second is intended to limit the licensing of a number of Canadian services in one genre of programming, so that the onerous requirements of services licensed to Canadians with regard to the exhibition of, and the expenditures on, Canadian programming can be met, maintained and increased.
Secondly, nowhere do the BDUs mention…
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TORONTO – Participants at the Canadian Music Week 2008 Global Forum say it’s time for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to step up and use their huge market power to take action against piracy, according to a summary report of the event that was released Friday.
The invitation-only workshop held in March in Toronto was attended by 120 music industry thinkers.
“Participants were near-unanimous in their view: rules for commercial relations are necessary in a global economy. Without rules – in part through a fresh round of copyright reform – new business models in the music industry may never get…
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Note: The number of cable TV customers acquired by Videotron has been updated based on new information provided by the cableco.
MONTREAL – Videotron grew its cable TV, Internet, telephony and wireless telephone customer bases in the first quarter ended March 31, 2008, the cableco announced Thursday.
Videotron had a total of 1,652,200 cable TV subscribers at March 31, a quarter-over-quarter increase of 14,100 (not 34,600 as previously reported by Videotron), compared with a 10,300 increase (not 29,200) in the same quarter of 2007. The cableco also recorded a net increase of 34,600 subscribers to its illico digital TV service for…
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LEAVE IT TO SHAW to not only demand genre protection go away, but to use a lovely incendiary word that broadcasters have long used against cable: monopoly.
When Shaw Communications’ submission to the CRTC on its upcoming policy review on broadcast distribution undertakings and specialty services addressed the Commission’s policy on genre protection (which means there’s only supposed to be one comedy specialty, one short film channel, one preschool channel, and so on), it refers to the protection as a genre monopoly.
“I’m not going to be lectured to by Jim Shaw about being in the monopoly business,” said…
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TORONTO – The CRTC must maintain its Canadian content spending requirements for Canadian pay and specialty TV services, the Coalition of Canadian Audio-Visual Unions (CCAU) stated Wednesday in a media release.
The call comes in advance of the CRTC’s public hearing on a review of the regulatory framework for broadcast distributors and specialty and pay TV. The three-week-long hearing begins April 8.
The coalition maintains that strong rules must remain in place to achieve the cultural objectives of the Broadcasting Act.
The CCAU is also urging the CRTC to maintain the current regulatory framework that supports the Canadian pay and…
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