U.K.-based start-up Lower Street announced Monday it has acquired Canadian podcast producer Pacific Content from Rogers Sports and Media.
Cartt sister publication Broadcast Dialogue reported in May Rogers Sports and Media was shuttering its branded podcast division, which it acquired in May 2019.
Lower Street is a full-service podcast production agency that works with such brands as Adobe, Pepsico and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It was founded in 2017 in Somerset, England, by Harry Morton.
“When I founded Lower Street I looked up to one company in particular, Pacific Content,” Morton said in a statement….
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By Connie Thiessen
Music Canada, which represents the interests of Canada’s major record labels, says the CRTC’s move to impose mandatory contributions on the biggest music streamers, could amount to a “cultural policy disaster.”
In June, the commission announced that online streaming services not affiliated with a Canadian broadcaster that make $25 million or more in Canada, must contribute five per cent of their Canadian revenues to support the Canadian broadcasting system under the Online Streaming Act. Starting in the 2024-25 broadcast year, the funds will be directed to areas of immediate need, including local radio and television…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers is not done buying premium programming after its blockbuster purchase of the rights to content from Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal, the company’s chief financial officer said Wednesday, with a strategy of cutting out the middleman and going direct-to-studio seizing a chunk of its programming costs for quarters to come.
“We are looking to source leading programming that the customers watch, making that available and making that available at lower margins by cutting out the middleman company and going direct,” Rogers’s Glenn Brandt said during the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call.
“We will continue efforts and opportunities in…
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Regulator said it believes Corus’s Global should receive ILNF funding
By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC is asking the public whether it should modify the Independent Local News Fund (ILNF) to expand eligibility, ensure news quality, and whether it should favour recipients operating in remote and underserved communities.
The commission launched Tuesday the consultation on revisiting the ILNF, which was spawned in 2016. It follows the regulator’s decision, as part of the Online Streaming Act, to force foreign and standalone online platforms to allocate five per cent of their prior year’s Canadian revenues toward content funds, including 1.5 per cent to the ILNF,…
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The CRTC is asking Rogers to explain how the recent increase of its service set-up fee from $60 to $70 on Rogers and Fido plans is consistent with the federal government’s recent amendments to the Telecommunications Act introduced this spring in Budget 2024.
Division 37 of Bill C-69, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 16, 2024, which received royal assent on June 20, contains a prohibition stating, “A telecommunications service provider must not charge a fee to a subscriber that is related to the activation or modification of a telecommunications service…
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Pre-Olympic coverage includes Canadian women’s first soccer match Thursday
CBC is inviting Canadians to mark the official start of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 on Friday, July 26 with live coverage of the opening ceremony on CBC, CBC Gem, CBC News Network, partner networks TSN and Sportsnet, CBC’s dedicated Paris 2024 website and the CBC Paris 2024 app for iOS and Android devices.
Beginning at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT, a pre-ceremony show hosted by Paris Prime Live’s Scott Russell and CBC News chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault will build…
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By Ahmad Hathout
The Federal Court has granted a fresh website-blocking order that will force broadcasters to block websites streaming different sports league matches for next season.
The July 9 order draws on previous site-blocking precedent but deviates in that it is being applied to multiple sports in a single order. It also applies a permanent ban on the defendants from broadcasting the unlicensed content, though the reason for the site-blocking order in the first place is because said defendants, who can operate from abroad, have historically not stopped the activity.
As such, the order captures all live pre- and regular season…
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The CRTC has told Rogers in a letter it plans to publish the full Xona Partners report on the cable giant’s July 2022 major service outage, after receiving letters from public interest groups requesting disclosure of the full text of the report.
On July 4, the CRTC posted an executive summary of the Xona report, which detailed the results of an independent assessment of the Rogers network architecture for reliability and resiliency, as well as the processes in place at Rogers to manage network changes and respond to network incidents like…
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Media company says it is confident in slate of rebranded and new content after losing Discovery rights
By Ahmad Hathout
Corus Entertainment executives said Monday that the pure-play media company is expecting to make further cuts to full-time positions, which will bring the total by the end of August to almost 800, or 25 per cent, since the beginning of its fiscal year in September.
“Our board of directors has given us a clear mandate to decisively right-size the business and create a more sustainable future,” John Gossling, co-CEO of Corus and chief financial officer, said on a third quarter conference call…
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Following the debut of Apple’s Vision Pro virtual reality headset last Friday, Radioplayer announced the availability of its app specifically designed to leverage the capabilities of the spatial computing platform.
Launching in Canada, the U.K., France and Germany, Radioplayer’s new app “goes beyond a simple adaptation of its popular mobile iOS app” and “introduces a virtual radio device that users can place within their own reality, enhancing the immersive experience of listening to their favorite radio stations,” says a press release.
“At Radiodays Europe in Munich this March, we unveiled our new technology and product platform for cars…
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