TORONTO – Rogers is embarking on a cross country celebration of “The Game”, unveiling the inaugural Rogers Hometown Hockey Tour that is scheduled to touch down in 25 hockey hotbeds between and Burnaby, BC and St. John’s, NL.
Each week during the 2014/15 NHL season, the Rogers Hometown Hockey Tour will roll into a different community with a weekend of free outdoor hockey festivities for all ages, from interactive games to meet and greets with NHL Alumni. The weekend’s events will culminate in an outdoor viewing party of an NHL game broadcast every Sunday, hosted by hockey guru Ron MacLean live onsite…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – The CEOs of BCE and Rogers say they are more than happy to offer access to their upcoming online subscription video-on-demand services to other TV providers, and at least one of those other providers is eager to sign up.
At the annual BMO Media and Telecom investors’ conference in Toronto on Tuesday, Rogers CEO Guy Laurence said Shomi, a joint project with Shaw that is set to launch in November, was to have other partners (as Cartt.ca first reported earlier this year). But they decided to launch without them because they “couldn’t get their…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – Bell Media continued its programming spending spree, announcing an agreement with HBO for all Canadian multi-platform rights to HBO's complete off-air catalogue of television programming.
The agreement is separate and distinct from its earlier announcement that HBO Canada has secured the entire past-season library of every HBO series currently on air.
In this agreement, Bell Media has exclusively acquired all national multi-platform rights, including SVOD, for the entire off-air library of HBO's programming catalogue. The deal encompasses more than 850 hours of past scripted programming, as well as hundreds of hours of HBO movies, documentaries, and stand-up and music…
Continue Reading
SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT. Especially if I’m quoting Macbeth.
We have analyzed the hell out of the CRTC’s TV Policy Review which is set to begin Monday in Gatineau, but there’s something ungraspable about the whole thing. Is there too much on the table? Probably. Is the Regulator looking to solve problems it has no chance of fixing – or trying to solve some where none exist? Yes, and yes, certainly.
This is a hearing about all things English Television, or English language video. Yes I know it’s supposed to be about all things television in Canada, but let’s be honest here;…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – Rogers is making good on its promise to change the way that Canadians watch hockey, announcing a new mobile app for computers, phones and tablets that will allow fans to live stream over 1,000 regular season games and the NHL playoffs.
Rogers NHL GameCentre LIVE, scheduled to debut in October, will serve up the English and French online streaming rights to a range of national games, including Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday, Scotiabank Wednesday Night Hockey, and Hometown Hockey on Sundays, as well as 800 classic games from the NHL Vault dating back to 1960. In addition,…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – Sportsnet has finalized a three-year broadcast rights agreement with the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens, becoming the official English-language regional television rights holder. Bell Media-owned RDS holds the team's French-language TV rights.
The new agreement, which begins this season and runs through 2016/17, includes 42 regional games. Sportsnet East will be home to 39 regional Habs games, with three additional regional games airing on City Montreal. When combined with the national package of 40 Canadiens games, the NHL on Sportsnet will air all 82 regular season games across nine channels including CBC, City, Sportsnet (East, Ontario, West, and Pacific), Sportsnet…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The federal government said that it will force the communication industry to abandon paper bill charges after the country’s biggest companies failed to commit to doing so at Thursday’s CRTC review into the practice.
Industry Minister James Moore said Friday that charging extra fees to customers who receive paper copies of their bills, a practice known as pay-to-pay billing, was “unfair”, and promised that the government would introduce legislation to end it in the telecommunications sector. He did not say when such legislation would be tabled.
"More and more Canadians are finding a new charge appearing on their monthly…
Continue Reading
LONDON – Rogers Radio rebranded its London station from 102.3 BOBfm to the new 102.3 JACKfm on Thursday.
With five established sister stations in cities across Canada, the successful JACK Rogers Radio brand features hit music from such artists as Maroon 5, Adele, and P!nk, mixed with classic favourites from Queen, The Rolling Stones, and AC/DC. The new station will also feature “JACK’s No Repeat Work Day,” offering listeners no repeats between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM daily.
The new station format is being promoted through an out-of-home external media campaign, and across select Rogers Media properties.
“Appealing to a broad cross-section of…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – The slick-looking user interface of the new shomi service from Rogers and Shaw is purported to be one of the key differentiating features that will allow it to compete against other SVoD players, especially indomitable Netflix.
During its official announcement on Tuesday, Rogers Media president Keith Pelley described shomi’s “really spectacular” user interface as “far superior” to that of any other SVoD service.
“When you actually take a look at the product, it has taken a significant amount of time to actually build the user interface, to have a kind of ‘attitude’ on the user interface and to…
Continue Reading
TORONTO – Finally putting an end to months of speculation over plans to launch a Canadian subscription video-on-demand service, Rogers Media and joint-venture partner Shaw Media announced the highly anticipated SVoD service, dubbed shomi, in Toronto on Tuesday.
Cartt.ca broke the story in January that Rogers was working on an over-the-top video portal, but despite being continually pressed on the subject, until today, Rogers execs wouldn’t comment publically on the service other than Rogers CEO Guy Laurence’s recent cryptic allusion to the “Loch Ness Monster”.
And Cartt.ca doesn’t want to take it personally that Rogers and Shaw decided to officially…
Continue Reading
