IN THE FIRST PART OF Cartt.ca’s exclusive, wide-ranging interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CEO, Robert Rabinovitch talked about stable funding, the TV Policy Review, The One, CBC radio and SRC, among other topics.
Click here to read Part I of the story from last week.
In the second part of our chat, Rabinovitch goes over on demand strategies, HD, CBC Sports (the interview was prior to Nancy Lee’s departure), local news and the residual effects of the 2005 lockout. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Let’s switch back to English TV – but actually this question…
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TORONTO – One of the drawbacks to a lot of the American primetime reality/game shows is that Canadians – or folks from any other country – are not allowed in.
Survivor, Amazing Race, and Deal Or No Deal limit their contestants to Americans. Today, however, Global changed that last show a bit and will produce an all-Canadian Deal, complete with expat Canuck host Howie Mandel.
CTV has also copied foreign shows for Canadians, creating its own "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" in 2000 and producing the popular Canadian Idol for five seasons.
Today, Global Television announced an agreement…
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TORONTO – As reported here last week, negotiations on a new collective agreement between producers and actors began today in Toronto.
On Friday, the Canadian Film and Television Producers’ Association put out a press release warning ACTRA, the actors’ union, that our media times have changed and that any new contract will have to reflect that.
ACTRA showed up this morning with a 50-member opening day team which included the Trailer Park Boys, Robb Wells, Mike Smith and John Paul Tremblay (Ricky, Bubbles and Julian), Corner Gas star Eric Peterson, 24’s Alberta Watson, Wendy Crewson, Gordon Pinsent, Tonya Lee…
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QUEBEC – With a stroke of the pen, the CRTC’s battle with Quebec City problem-child radio station CHOI-FM, hooked up to the “judicial respirator” for more than two years, are effectively over.
The CRTC has approved an application by Radio Nord Communications Inc. to take over CHOI’s licence from Genex Communications, whose former talk show hosts (like Jeff Fillion and now-independent Quebec MP Andre Arthur) earned it top ratings and big advertising dollars but also lawsuits and the CRTC’s ultimate sanction, licence non-renewal.
In its decision handed down Friday, the CRTC brushed aside demands that it issue a general…
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OTTAWA – The Federal Court of Appeal has set aside a Copyright Board decision that Canadian broadcasting executives said was unfair and would cost jobs.
Just about a year after the release of the Copyright Board’s decision on the SOCAN-NRCC Radio Tariff 2003-2007, the Federal Court of Appeal has granted the CAB’s application for judicial review of the decision. At the time of the decision, the CAB called it "egregious and flawed," while John Cassaday, the CEO of Corus Entertainment, one of the country’s largest radio operators, said the decision would cost millions and "mean a loss…
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TORONTO – Saying the existing collective agreements between producers and actors were written "for a bygone era," Canada’s film and TV producers today warned ACTRA that major structural changes will be required.
The Canadian Film and Television Production Association (CFTPA) along with the Association de producteurs de films et de télévision du Québec (APFTQ) will meet the actors union ACTRA at the bargaining table on Monday, October 23, 2006 to come up with a new collective agreement covering performers working in the English-language film, television and new media sector in Canada.
The CFTPA says, rightly, that the global production…
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WHEN NBTEL FIRST CAME to market in 1998 with a digital TV product serving customers in Moncton and Saint John, N.B., the cable industry laughed.
Sure, it was all-digital television, but each TV needed its own set top box, channel-changing latency was a problem and due to the limitations of the early ADSL technology it used, all the TVs in the house had to be tuned to the same channel. Fine for homes without a second TV, but not so much for most folks.
At the time, NBTel (which is now Aliant) was the North American leader on the…
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TORONTO – Six people were inducted into the Canadian Telecom Hall of Fame at a gala dinner at The Carlu in Toronto Monday evening.
The event drew a large number of senior telecom folks and other key industry figures such as Industry Canada’s Michael Binder, the CRTC’s Len Katz, Nortel board member and former Industry Canada Minister John Manley, Persona Communications president and CEO Dean MacDonald, former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna, and assorted others.
Inducted were Rogers Communications CEO Edward S. "Ted" Rogers (accepting on-screen in the photo below) and his pioneering father E.S. Rogers Sr., telecom lawyer…
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I’VE GOT A BIT OF A SOFT spot for the CBC because when you grew up where I did, the CBC was it.
Apologies to CTV’s Northern Ontario precursor, MCTV, but when I think of old shows from my youth, it’s most often the CBC that springs to mind. Like sooo many of my fellow Canadians, when I think of the Ceeb, I invariably recall many frigid Saturday evenings inside watching Hockey Night in Canada: Me and my father sitting down with a big bowl of warm, greasy, salted popcorn. I usually fell asleep right after Peter Puck during the…
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QUEBEC – The long legal effort to pin charges of satellite TV-signal piracy on two Quebec men, and have them stick, has passed another judicial test.
The Quebec Court of Appeal has dismissed their appeal of a guilty verdict handed down by the Quebec Superior Court in April, 2005.
In a short, 16-paragraph decision, the three-member Appeal Court accepted the arguments of Superior Court judge Wilbrod Claude Décarie, who had reversed the men’s acquittal by the lower Quebec Court in 2004.
Judge Décarie found Jacques D’Argy of Drummondville and Richard Thériault of nearby St-Nicéphore guilty of three counts each…
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