OTTAWA – In what can only be viewed as a big win by Canada’s telcos, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier today came very close to deregulating the local telephony market.
The minister is setting aside key portions of the April 2006 CRTC local market forbearance decision and will place cable voice providers and traditional telcos on much closer regulatory footing. The ILECs had appealed the decision to federal cabinet.
The 25% market share loss benchmark has been erased, as have the winback rules which would restrict ILECs from contacting recently lost customers for 90 days after departure,
The new proposed…
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TORONTO – After saying he believes it’s "good business" to help produce and then show Canadian content, Astral Media CEO Ian Greenberg today sent a message to Gatineau, cautioning the CRTC against letting conventional broadcasters into the wholesale fee game.
"Our pay and specialty television services have invested over $1 billion in the development and purchase of original Canadian-content production, and in support of home-grown talent, since we began in this industry. We believe it is good business to do this," he said in a speech to shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Toronto.
"But even more…
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GATINEAU – As the seventh and final day of the 2006 CRTC TV Policy Review hearing wound down yesterday, a frustrated group got very wound up, and a broadcasting legend weighed in.
In a process that has sometimes gone into excruciating detail about how much more we may pay for our TV universe, how we’ll receive programs, how big a role advertising will play and what we’ll see between the ads – a big problem should have been hard to overlook. But on this day, James Roots, executive director of the Canadian Association of the Deaf, made a passionate…
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GATINEAU – Organizations representing many persistent voices opposed to Canada’s 1999 over-the-air television policy – along with a rare cameo by the Ontario Culture Minister – took the stage Monday for Day 6 of the CRTC’s review of this policy.
The unions and guilds appearing for English and French writers and actors, and for English directors and crew, almost all requested a mix of re-regulation and new rules for conventional broadcasters – a distinct contrast to many broadcasters, who last week called for fewer rules and greater access to revenues.
In what was described as the “first appearance in…
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GATINEAU – If the CCTA was still around, it wouldn’t have been able to find consensus among its members for the CRTC’s TV Policy Review either.
While the schisms among the Canadian Association of Broadcasters members meant that association was unable to come up with a submission containing any consensus among its members, some of whom want large carriage fees for broadcasters, some who want small ones and some who oppose them altogether, fractures of opinion exist in the distributor world, too.
Two of the former Canadian Cable Television Association‘s largest members faced the Commission yesterday with diametrically…
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GATINEAU – As the so-called softer side of the industry comes to the fore over the next few, final days of the CRTC TV Policy Review hearing, groups like producers, actors, documentary makers and unions are just hoping the Commission pays more attention to them than the consumer media.
Reporters had elbows up in a crowd most of the week as the likes of CTV, Rogers, Shaw, Bell and Global Television faced the Commission – and then the microphones and notebooks right after.
No such problem Thursday afternoon and Friday.
At one point Friday morning we counted 13 people…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The idea that Canada’s signal distributors should pay conventional broadcasters fees to carry their signals is “trash” according to Rogers Communications CEO Ted Rogers.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday following his company’s appearance before the CRTC on day three of its over-the-air TV review hearings, Rogers countered the many broadcaster arguments in favour of such charges, known as fee-for-carriage (FFC), made over the hearing’s first two days. He said broadcasters should look to new technologies – not new regulations – for new revenues. “These guys should get back to high def and keep up with the new stuff.”…
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MASSET, B.C. – GwaiiTel and its Haida Gwaii Community Network launched operations today, launching high speed Internet in the remote communities of the Queen Charlotte Islands.
In collaboration with local Internet service providers, the network brings high-speed Internet service to about 5,000 people living in the Islands’ seven largest communities, said the press release.
However, the local cable operator, Masset-Haida TV, also says it already offers high speed Internet in the area and has been for a while.
The Gwaii Trust Society formed GwaiiTel earlier this year, partnering with the Province of British Columbia and Telus to connect Haida…
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FEE-FOR-CARRIAGE will happen.
There. I said it. I don’t like it and sure don’t want to pay it, but I’ve come to believe – thanks to my talks and travels this year with folks from all sides of the issue – that in some form, the CRTC is going to grant the conventional broadcasters’ demand for more money from Canadians as additional compensation for the content they deliver.
"On the face of it, it’s a bizarre idea," Rogers vice-chairman Phil Lind told me recently. "(Consumers) get nothing extra, they just have to pay five dollars more."
True enough, but…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – There just isn’t enough cash in the system for conventional broadcasters to convert to digital television, representatives from CBC and TQS told the CRTC today.
And the only way free up some resources to rectify that is a fee for carriage model.
CBC/Radio-Canada’s president and CEO Robert Rabinovitch, EVP of CBC Television, Richard Stursberg; EVP of French Services Sylvain Lafrance; VP and CTO Ray Carnovale; and VP strategy and business development Michel Tremblay, were part of a the Corp.’s panel in front of the Commission this morning.
All of the CBC’s funds are tied up in producing…
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