TORONTO – The Directors Guild of Canada filed comments yesterday with the CRTC in support of public disclosure of aggregate financial data for over-the-air television and radio broadcasters.
DGC requested that revenue and expenditure information for media giants such as CTVgm, CanWest and Rogers be made public “in order to evaluate the manner in which CRTC policies are being applied, and the extent to which broadcasters are contributing to the system,” says the Guild’s release.
"This information is critical for analytical purposes. Without this data, industry stakeholders cannot properly participate in the public process," said Brian Anthony, DGC national…
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GATINEAU – Just like fictional detective John McClane has always been the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, Canadian Association of Broadcasters president and CEO Glenn O’Farrell had a similar way of describing the two over-the-air high definition license applicants on Tuesday:
“Put simply, we believe these are the wrong applications, for the wrong licences, at the wrong time,” he said.
HDTV Networks is a bid for a national over-the-air broadcast network with transmitters in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax. YES TV is a license request for a Toronto-only high…
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GATINEAU – On the one hand, John Bitove says his proposed company, HDTV Networks, wouldn’t take local ad revenue away from existing TV broadcasters because he wouldn’t want to do much local programming.
On the other hand, if you’re going to be a conventional, over-the-air television broadcaster – complete with all the rather favourable must-carry and simultaneous substitution regulations – part of the deal is you must be in local programming, reflecting each community in which you have a transmitter, back to itself.
Bitove, founder and chairman of Canadian Satellite Radio – owners of XM Canada – wants a…
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CORUS ENTERTAINMENT IS bringing one of the most venerable print titles in the trend industry to the small screen on Thursday.
Launching on Valentines Day is CosmopolitanTV – or CosmoTV for short. The category two digital specialty is a joint venture with Corus and Hearst Communications and is the first English-language television channel styled from the magazine (the other two are in Spain and Latin America) that gives 18-34 year old women “sizzling sex tips” and helps them identify the hottest hunks and how to reel them in (or at least satisfy them in the bedroom).
Corus already knows…
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WHEN YOU RUN A television network, you get used to complaints. It’s the price of doing business. Canadians are discerning viewers who demand a great deal from this country’s broadcasters – and rightly so.
As a multi-faith and multicultural channel, VisionTV is subject to its fair share of criticism. Some complaints, however, are more troubling than others.
In 2007, the upset occasioned by a VisionTV broadcast featuring a controversial Muslim scholar led network management to undertake some serious self-examination.
In a decision issued earlier this month, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CSBC) concluded that VisionTV did not violate the…
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DARTMOUTH – Supplier Arcom has announced Lotha James is now territory manager of sales – central and western Canada
James “brings a wealth of knowledge in the wireless and CATV markets and will nicely complement our depth in the telecom and enterprise networks markets. He will work closely with our regional managers, located in Ottawa and Vancouver to expand our service and product offerings in his territory,” says the Arcom release.
James began his career in the telecommunications industry in 1979 with Rogers Cable. After ten years as primarily a headend technician he ventured into the supplier distribution side…
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GATINEAU – “The CTF is gratified that the great majority of interveners strongly support the Canadian Television Fund and emphasize that one of the Fund’s greatest strengths is its adaptability to new challenges faced by the industry,” said Douglas Barrett, chairman of the board of the Canadian Television Fund, in closing the week-long hearing on the future of the fund today.
“When considering changes to the industry’s funding system, the most critical objective is ensuring that, given that the competing demands of stakeholders in the production, broadcast, and distribution system, the interests of the Canadian public, including both taxpayers…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein tells Shaw Communications CEO Jim Shaw in a letter that the three commissioners overseeing the public hearing on the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) “have the most experience in the broadcasting industry.”
“Their in-depth understanding of television production is essential to achieve the above-mentioned goal ,” states his February 4 letter to Shaw.
Von Finckenstein’s response comes after Shaw sent a letter to the CRTC…
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HAMILTON – Fibre to the home is certainly possible – and from a pure bandwidth point of view, certainly desirable. From an economic point of view, though? Not so much.
And is such a conversion going to happen any time soon here in Canada? Not likely. At least that was the consensus around the lunch table I sat at Tuesday at Carmen’s Banquet Hall in Hamilton during the SCTE Ontario Chapter Winter Technical Conference.
Well over 200 from the technical and engineering side of the cable industry descended on Hamilton to hear 10 speakers wax eloquently about the advantages…
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REGULATION IS GOOD. Necessary even. And regulation is already all around us and has been forever, not just enabling, but driving commerce and business success, says Bill Roberts, president and CEO of S-Vox, the company which owns and runs VisionTV, One: The Body, Mind & Spirit Channel and The Christian Channel.
Such statements are an outright abomination to the deregulation set in the electronic media industry in Canada (I’m looking at you, cable operators and other BDUs…), but Roberts makes a case that not only does the broadcast and cable industry still require regulation, but that the companies already…
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