TORONTO – Rogers Communications confirmed today it has hired former Apple Canada senior managing director Brent Johnston to be president, Rogers Wireless.
He stepped down from his position at Apple last week and starts at Rogers on Monday. Johnston is rather familiar with Rogers CEO Joe Natale, having worked under Natale (when Natale was Telus' second in command and then CEO) for 11 years as VP channel marketing, VP mobility solutions and SVP consumer marketing. Johnston left for Apple in February of 2016.
Bringing Johnston in is the headline of a bit of an executive shift where Phil Hartling, who had…
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TORONTO – Randy Lennox says he promised when first joining Bell Media from Universal Music Canada not to "do change for change's sake."
But scale for scale's sake?
Bulking up by bringing top U.S. premium brands like HBO, Starz, Showtime, Bloomberg and iHeartRadio into Bell Media's Canadian content tent has made size a strategy at the Toronto-based media titan. "We are committed to becoming the Canadian custodian of scalable world brands,” Bell Media CEO Lennox told Cartt.ca on Thursday ahead of his Upfront presentation in Toronto.
But the focus at Bell Media isn't on bulkiness, or even synergies, but on leveraging new…
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TORONTO – Bell Media and Rogers Media-owned Dome Productions said that it will produce broadcast footage from this week’s G7 Summit in Charlevoix, Quebec in 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) 2160p60 resolution.
For some of the principle areas of coverage, Dome will be producing and capturing in UHD High Dynamic Range (HDR) format.
The company said that this will mark the first time that the leaders of the G7 member countries are captured in UHD HDR based on Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) HDR format, promising the best possible picture quality for live broadcast.
Dome began providing G7 host broadcast services in…
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WEDNESDAY, THE BUSY AND informative Canadian Telecom Summit was wrapped up by a keynote speech from ISED Minister Navdeep Bains, where he announced a $10/month broadband program for low income Canadians and three key spectrum announcements which will help drive the future – 5G technology.
Just as I dashed off to talk to the minister in a media scrum, one of our more prescient readers grabbed me by the arm and said “Sprint and T-Mobile want to merge in order to get together and roll out 5G rather than do it on…
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TORONTO – Corus Entertainment's Maria Hale says she didn't sweat the small stuff at the recent Los Angeles Screenings by having to bid aggressively for digital rights to new U.S. shows against Netflix and Amazon, in addition CTV and Rogers Media.
However, cord-cutting in Canada inspired by Netflix as an increasing programming powerhouse did reshape Corus' upcoming 2018-19 primetime slate which was unveiled to local advertisers today in Toronto. "At the LA Screenings, we didn't feel their (Netflix) pressure, but we definitely feel their heat throughout the year," Hale, senior vice president of global entertainment and acquisitions at Corus, told…
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TORONTO—As might be expected, Canadian telecom executives are already choosing up sides for the forthcoming battle over the CTRC's proposals for reshaping how the feds regulate and tax traditional and new media across the country.
That much was evident at the Canadian Telecom Summit here late Tuesday. Speaking during the annual "Regulatory Blockbuster" panel moderated by Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O'Brien, execs representing industry incumbents and upstarts battled it out over the Commission's new recommendations to "develop better regulatory approaches that engage all audio and video services and for each to participate," producing plenty of verbal fireworks.
Generally backing the…
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TORONTO – Rogers, Telus and SaskTel were quick to endorse Connecting Families, the new initiative designed to help make the Internet affordable to low income Canadians, announced Wednesday by Innovation, Science and Economic Development minister Navdeep Bains at the Canadian Telecom Summit.
Connecting Families will invest $13.2 million over five years, starting in 2017-2018. For $10 per month, up to 220,000 qualifying households will receive an Internet package of no less than 10 Mbps download speeds (or the fastest available) and a minimum of 100 GB of data usage each month, with no equipment or installation fees. Families must…
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TORONTO – We’ve oft been in audiences covering dreary, news-free ministerial speeches. The Navdeep Bains keynote to the 2018 Canadian Telecom Summit today in Toronto was not that.
The Innovation, Science and Economic Development minister came with a crisp, fully loaded speech which satisfied some important needs for which many of the Canadian telecom gathering’s delegates have been clamoring (and he didn’t say “middle class families” once).
An issue which Summit co-founder Mark Goldberg and others have long been hounding various governments about has been the lack of a national, co-ordinated program to help connect low income families to the Internet….
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TORONTO – Post-Vice, Rogers Media is growing, diversifying — and in a better place than a year or two ago.
That's the word from Rogers Media president Rick Brace, who hailed his company's effort to turn around the media giant, especially on the traditional TV front as viewers increasingly migrate to Netflix, Facebook, Google and others. "As a television executive, you always want to be number one," Brace told Cartt.ca on Tuesday ahead of his company's Upfront presentation in Toronto.
"But, from the standpoint of City, we approach it with a practical attitude: what's the best we can do to ensure…
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TORONTO – Once fully deployed, the move to 5G wireless will fundamentally change how we live in Canada, but when and how that will happen is still open to much debate. That’s the message from a panel of telecom executives who gathered on Tuesday at the 2018 Telecom Summit in Toronto to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the next wireless revolution.
In time, 5G will power self-driving cars, but for now it’s the federal government that is driving the 5G show in Canada and it’s taking the slow lane when it comes to releasing spectrum. While Rogers, Telus, Shaw…
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