TORONTO – Despite being about two months away from launching its network, new wireless entrant Public Mobile opened the doors to 25 stores in Toronto and Montreal Thursday to start pre-selling four handsets and promoting its $40 unlimited talk and text packages.
Company CEO Alek Krstajic said that the network will launch by mid-May in Toronto and Montreal, and will double its territory, and quadruple its number of stores, by the end of the year. Public Mobile paid $52.3 million for G-band spectrum spanning the corridor from Windsor to Quebec City, an area that includes nearly 19 million Canadians.
The idea…
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EDMONTON – Canada’s current broadcast legislation fosters anti-competitive behaviour among the dominant cable companies, says Allarco Entertainment, owners of Canadian pay-TV service Super Channel.
In a letter to the Heritage Committee on Wednesday, the Edmonton-based company called for “ways to enforce meaningful consequences to anti-competitive behaviour” such as including administrative monetary penalties (AMPs) in the Broadcasting Act, and adding “civil remedies” for licensees that have been “harmed by breaches of regulatory obligations by Broadcast Distribution Undertakings (BDUs)”.
It also asked that the Heritage Committee acknowledge “the ineffectiveness of the present regulatory system to enable the CRTC to achieve its mission of…
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VANCOUVER – CTV will carry live coverage of the Closing Ceremony from the Vancouver 2010 Paralympic Winter Games in both English and French this Sunday.
The announcement comes after the CTV-Rogers broadcast consortium faced criticism for airing the Opening Ceremony on tape delay a full day after the fact. While the International Paralympic Movement requests that the ceremonies be broadcast live, The Canadian Press reported that the choice to tape delay the event was due to “contracts for other programming that couldn’t be broken”.
While the budget for both the opening and closing ceremonies of last month’s Olympics was $38 million, the total budget…
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TORONTO – Score Media is giving its coverage of the annual NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball tournament the full court press.
Running from March 16 to April 5, the U.S.-based championship featuring 65 teams will be available on sports network The Score, with highlights and coverage also available on its website, its mobile app ScoreMobile and its Hardcore Sports Radio channel on Sirius satellite radio. Select games will also be available via Rogers’ and Shaw’s on demand platforms, and on Sun TV.
"For three weeks straight, fans will be hooked on NCAA March Madness and we’ll be right there guiding them…
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TORONTO – The HD version of CanWest’s year-old MovieTime channel has joined Rogers’ digital cable VIP offering for its HD customers.
The Friday launch brings CanWest’s stable of HD programming to seven, with History Television, Showcase, National Geographic Channel and four Global Television stations – Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton – currently broadcasting in high definition.
"With the immense popularity of MovieTime, we’re delighted to announce the launch of MovieTime HD – Canada’s only HD specialty destination for recent blockbusters", said Daniel Eves, CanWest’s VP strategic programming, specialty, in the announcement. "The channel will offer viewers an incomparable movie viewing experience, combining superior…
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TORONTO – Rogers radio made a few changes to its senior management team late on Friday.
Chuck McCoy will assume the role of VP and cluster manager for Toronto/Kitchener Radio, while Julie Adam will take on the role of VP programming and national program director for the company’s radio division. Adam will also retain the role of program director of either 98.1 CHFI or KiSS 92.5.
McCoy has held the role of national program director at Rogers for the last five years. Adam became general manager and program director of 98.1 CHFI in 2004, and added assistant national program director duties…
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TORONTO – The solution for what ails the radio industry is a forward-looking attitude and an ability to navigate the changing technological landscape. That was the main message from radio industry experts who spoke at a panel session at Canadian Music Week in Toronto on Thursday.
“Stop nostalgically looking back at the good ole’ days of radio,” said Fred Jacobs, president of Jacobs Media, a radio industry consulting firm based in Southfield, Mich. “It’s time to finally face some of the problems head on.”
While technological advances have changed the way music lovers consume their music, Jacobs said that radio’s true…
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TORONTO – Goldman Sachs is appealing an Ontario court’s decision to allow Shaw Communications to proceed with its takeover of debt-laden CanWest Global.
The move means that the bid put forth by Toronto-based investment fund Catalyst Capital, the Asper family and former Rogers execs Rael Merson and John Tory, is still in play.
In documents filed in court this week, Goldman Sachs, which financed CanWest’s purchase of specialty channels from Alliance Atlantis back in 2007, appears to be pulling out all the stops to protect its investment, while accusing the new buyers of trying to pick up the…
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TORONTO – More Canadians now catch their favourite TV shows on-line than by personal video recorders and video-on-demand combined.
According to results from the Q4 edition of Digital Life Canada, Solution Research Group’s quarterly trend survey, 50% of on-line Canadians watched TV on-line at some point in the past, and 25% said they did so in the past week. Only 13% said that they watched a show on a PVR or cable on-demand (10%) in the past week.
But most on-line viewing is still catch-up, the research determined, with 53% of respondents saying that they watched on-line most recently because…
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TORONTO – Although they were hard pressed to admit it, cable operators at Wednesday’s SCTE Canadian Summit acknowledged that customer complaints to their call centres are often the best measurement of the quality of digital service being provided by their networks.
It isn’t that these cable ops are lacking network monitoring platforms, or don’t use the resultant diagnostic data to address problems detected by those tools. The bigger issue is that many of the existing measurement and diagnostic tools on the market tell only part of the story, said the speakers who took part in a panel discussion on digital quality issues.
Michel Lapointe, senior…
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