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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OTTAWA – The Cable Public Affairs Channel has named Jeremy Clark as its director of network and programming operations.
Effective March 15, Clark will head up CPAC’s programming department, working closely with executive producer Peter Van Dusen, to ensure programming excellence, technical superiority and quality control, the announcement detailed.
Clark was most recently regional station manager at Rogers TV in the Waterloo, ON region.
www.cpac.ca
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TORONTO – Rogers has started up a new customer-focused blog called ‘Rogers RedBoard’ in an effort to further connect with its customers.
“RedBoard will be a place where we can talk about our vision, explain our services and policies and geek out about the latest new technology”, reads a post from social media senior director, Keith McArthur. “Our goal is to keep jargon to a minimum and to focus on providing useful information, interviews with decision makers and answers to your questions.”
What’s with the name? A play on the word ‘whiteboard’, often used in meetings rooms, this “Rogers-red version is a place to…
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TORONTO – Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium is gearing up to deliver a record 57 hours of high-definition television coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Paralympic Winter Games in English and French from March 12-21, 2010.
This marks the most hours of coverage ever delivered to Canadian audiences, and the first time the Paralympic Winter Games are being produced entirely in HD by a Canadian rights-holder.
The Consortium’s offering includes 27 hours of coverage in English on CTV, TSN and Rogers Sportsnet, as well as 30 hours of coverage in French on RDS and RIS Info Sports. Highlights include the Opening…
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“About a month later at a cable show in San Antonio, I bumped into an engineering legend named Israel Switzer, who worked for years at Maclean Hunter Cable. He was now consulting to upstart U.S. long-distance competitor MCI Communications. I knew and respected him a great deal.
“Israel asked me about cellular and what my plans were. I told him I was looking into it. He said he thought it was the future of telecommunications and urged me to get in before it was too late. I had to pay attention to a statement like that from a man of…
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