TORONTO – While the number of Canadians tuning into NHL hockey on television in Canada is down (despite Rogers public complaints about how ratings service Numeris is filling its viewership panels), Rogers Communications’ CEO and CFO say they’re pleased with the overall performance of the first half of the first season of the company’s 12-year, $5.2 billion rights deal.
“Actually, NHL’s doing very well for us, we’re very pleased with the execution of it thus far, and excited as we go through the rest of the reason. In fact, I spent yesterday in a…
Continue Reading
ACCORDING TO A Globe and Mail article published this weekend, “the ratings for NHL games in the first year of the broadcast contract for Rogers continue to slide,” based on information from Numeris, the company that provides all broadcast ratings in Canada. Solution Research Group’s independent tracking research conducted in December 2014 suggests a similar trend line for NHL audiences on TV.
Early that month, we asked a national sample of 1,500 Canadians aged 12 or older whether they followed NHL and a number of other professional leagues – and…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – The participant list for Industry Canada’s upcoming AWS-3 and 2500 MHz auctions this spring is beginning to take shape. Among those who have confirmed to Cartt.ca that they have submitted applications to participate in the two aforementioned auctions are Rogers Communications and Telus Corp.
SaskTel says it applied for the AWS-3, but noted it is ineligible for the 2500 MHz sale. Bell Canada and Eastlink wouldn’t confirm or deny that they filed applications. Vidéotron and MTS hadn’t replied to Cartt.ca by deadline.
Wind Mobile, which recently completed a restructuring, had previously announced its…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – Rogers is gearing up to deliver live pay-per-view coverage of the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup and will extend access to that coverage to Bell, MTS, SaskTel, Shaw/Shaw Direct and Telus subscribers.
The 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup kicks off on February 13 at 5:00 PM ET/2:00 PM PT with Sri Lanka vs. New Zealand, and continues through to the final match on March 28. Canadian fans without a pay-per-view subscription can catch Pakistan as it meets defending champion India on February 14 at 10:30 PM ET/7:30 PM PT on OMNI.2.
As the exclusive national distributor, Rogers will offer all 49 matches…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – Rogers’ fourth quarter profits fell 7% despite gains in its Wireless and Media divisions, the company announced Thursday.
For the quarter ended December 31, 2014, Rogers posted net income of $297 million, down from $320 million in the fourth quarter of 2013, on operating revenue of $3.37 billion, which increased 4% from $3.24 billion year-over-year. Adjusted net income was $355 million which dipped 1% from $357 million last year.
Rogers said that the lift in consolidated revenue reflected 3% revenue growth in Wireless and 20% in Media, flat revenue in Cable, and a decline of 1% in Business Solutions. …
Continue Reading
TORONTO – The topic of simultaneous substitution always comes up a lot at this time of year, in the same breath as the Super Bowl and its nifty new ads.
While the average Canadian sports fan may be celebrating the CRTC’s decision Thursday to prohibit the controversial requirement in Super Bowl games starting in 2017, Bell Media, the Canadian rightsholder of the big game that airs nationally on its CTV network, told Cartt.ca that it was “extremely disappointed” with the ruling.
“The government is damaging the future of local television in Canada while rewarding U.S. corporations over home-grown companies”, said…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – Netflix subscriptions look to have peaked a little in Canada, while Canadians are taking a peek at shomi, according to new research released today by Toronto’s Solutions Research Group.
As part of its ongoing Digital Life Canada syndicated study, the company found that:
Netflix use is steady at 35% of Canadian online households (see below), which means it’s being used in about 4 million of the 11.5million Internet households in Canada. The penetration number stayed relatively flat through the latter half of 2014.
Netflix continues to garner exceptional satisfaction scores with an impressive 55% of paying subscribers saying it’s ‘excellent’…
Continue Reading
WE HATE THE WORD predictions. Research companies are good at that, but nobody can really predict the future. However, we do like making educated guesses – and now that we’re a month into 2015, we feel we can make some of those with better data than what we could have done before Christmas, when “prediction” articles are so fashionable.
So, here are a few of our prognostications…
Cord cutting will grow. Subscription TV providers used last year’s Deloitte TMT predictions and some middling overall results to show that cord-cutting is not happening – at least not at…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – The newly launched Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks (CENGN) is taking its show on the road in an effort to build Canada’s leadership in Next Generation Networks.
Starting in Edmonton Tuesday, CENGN kicks off a five-city Canadian roadshow with stops planned in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa to find and support small to medium enterprises (SME) working on Next Generation Networks. These technologies include software defined networks and network functions virtualization that address the growing demand for exploding Internet content on multiple platforms, and also underpin cloud-based applications and the Internet of Things (IoT), connecting and…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – As of yesterday, the Rogers Wireless network is Category 6 LTE enabled, the company announced in an e-mail.
“This means that we’re using carrier aggregation technology to combine 2100 MHz and 2600 MHz spectrum so customers can download even faster and enjoy higher quality video experiences on Category 6 enabled mobiles and tablets,” reads the e-mail, which adds Rogers is the first in Canada to do this.
Category 6 download speeds can be up to 300Mbps and the technology was first unveiled at last year’s Mobile World Congress by Qualcomm and Ericsson.
Starting yesterday, Rogers customers in select…
Continue Reading