OTTAWA – Rogers Media resolutely defended its decision to cut all news programming from its ethnic OMNI stations and replace it with current affairs shows before a Parliamentary committee on Wednesday.
Speaking before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, Rogers Media president Keith Pelley (pictured on CPAC.ca, which streamed the meeting) said the company really had no choice but to make changes to its programming. With viewer consumption patterns moving to digital platforms, the ongoing piracy problem, the significant drop in advertising revenue, as well as a plethora of ethnic specialty channels launched in recent…
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TORONTO – Rogers Media's TV ratings for the overall NHL Stanley Cup playoff rounds fell this season, compared to the 2014 championship rounds, due in part to Canadians viewing live game action on digital platforms.
Rogers Media, which has just ended the first year of a 12-year, $5.2 billion national broadcast and multimedia contract with the NHL, told Cartt.ca that the overall Stanley Cup playoff round on the flagship Sportsnet channel and CBC Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts pulled in an average audience of 1.5 million viewers, down 2% from the 1.53 million average audience for the 2014…
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OTTAWA – Canada’s wireless carriers are being asked to turn over their Apple iPhone sales records as the Competition Bureau deepens its probe into alleged anti-competitive clauses in Apple Canada sales contracts.
According to a Toronto Star report on Tuesday, the Bureau filed applications with the Federal Court on Monday calling for data from carriers including Rogers, Bell and Telus.
As Cartt.ca reported, the Bureau filed a court application last December requiring Apple Canada Inc. to provide records and written returns of information relevant to the investigation. The Star report quoted an unnamed source that said the Bureau is dissatisfied with the…
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TORONTO – Rogers’-owned weekly news magazine Maclean’s is offering Canadians the first opportunity to hear from all major federal party leaders in a nationally televised debate in the lead up to this fall’s federal election.
Scheduled for August 6 from 8:00 to 10:00 PM ET, the debate will air commercial-free on City, OMNI.1, OMNI.2, and CPAC, with live streaming on Macleans.ca, Citytv.com, CityNews.ca, OMNItv.ca, CPAC.ca, Facebook, and YouTube, according to Monday’s announcement. Rogers Radio news stations will also carry the debate live on 680News.com, 570news.com, 660News.com, 1310News.com, News1130.com, and News957.com. For multilingual audiences, OMNI Television's coverage will be translated into Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese,…
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TORONTO – The emergence of a fourth national wireless player would cause a ripple within the wireless sector in Canada, but the risk to the country’s three incumbents may be overblown, says Canaccord Genuity.
In a report on Monday, research analyst Aravinda Galappatthige proposed and evaluated a potential facilities-based wireless new entrant model based on the combination of Wind Mobile Canada, Mobilicity and Videotron’s spectrum holdings outside of its home province. Dubbed Newco, the fictional wireless provider was assumed to cover British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario, a model which combines Wind and Mobilicity’s existing 3G operations with Videotron’s AWS-1, AWS-3,…
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TORONTO – A coalition of professional associations, unions and media organizations, including Cartt.ca, have thrown their support behind an advertising campaign highlighting the value and benefits of professional journalism.
The campaign, known as JournalismIS, aims to rally the wider community of journalists, media workers, media corporations, and media consumers to increase awareness, recognition and support for professional journalism. Friday’s launch at the Ryerson University Rogers Communication Centre in Toronto included more than 100 journalists, media employees, and representatives from newspaper publishers and broadcasters.
"News is the lifeblood of our democracy. As the volume of information and the range of opinion available to media consumers…
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BANFF – Telling trends from fads is too often a mugs game. A peek at Amazon suggests that a book on trends seems to be written every 15 minutes and at times, here in Banff, it was frequently difficult to parse true trends from professional aspiration or wishful thinking.
But we did get some glimpses.
Canadians have over 600 television services to choose from, and one in four of us is a four screen consumer (TV, tablet, PC, phone) and the emerging bias to enhanced pick-and-pay was viewed by many as heralding more investment in programming to survive in a world…
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TORONTO – Rogers is shutting down its online real estate brokerage Zoocasa on June 22 as the communications giant refocuses on its core areas of business.
According to a Toronto Star report late Tuesday, Zoocasa began as a listing website in 2008 before a 2013 relaunch where it began connecting buyers and sellers with realtors.
The report cites a source that estimates that Zoocasa has been losing about $1 million a month for much of the last two years, carrying high administrative and technology platform costs that far outstripped the number of real estate deals
“After June 22, 2015, the brokerage will…
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TORONTO — Adding some broadcast content into the mix at the Canadian Telecom Summit last week, experts from the video content creation and distribution industries discussed the challenges and opportunities arising from the advent of over-the-top services during a special panel discussion.
OTT is about a “content revolution”, said George Burger, advisor at Internet TV provider VMedia, an upstart BDU. “ a massively disruptive event…and it’s going to make the disruption that happened to the music industry, with Napster, pale in comparison completely,” Burger said.
“It’s flourishing from the consumer point of view. Consumers have never, ever had it better,”…
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THE QUEBEC GOVERNMENT intends to interfere in commerce on the Internet, the free choice of Quebecers to choose with whom to do business, and to require ISPs to establish an architecture of censorship, all with a view to driving users willy-nilly to Quebec’s official gambling site.
These measures were announced in the Quebec budget of March 2015.
As an aside, I note there has not yet been a word of protest from any quarters, including the federal government. Why is this proposal to transgress federal jurisdiction over communications undertakings going unchallenged? Consider that the CRTC recently blasted…
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