TORONTO and CALGARY – With Industry Canada’s review of the CRTC decision on Globalive still on-going, it’s hurry up and wait for the potential new wireless entrant.
With nothing but time on its hands, the company has sent 400 of their newly trained employees out in Calgary and the Greater Toronto Area to commit ‘random acts of kindness’ such as distributing hand sanitizer and pumping gas, or helping with charities such as the Salvation Army and local food banks.
In the meantime, incumbent telcos and even Globalive itself have been busy compiling their submissions for Industry Minister Tony Clement to aid in the review process. All…
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GATINEAU – The word of the day on Wednesday at the CRTC hearing? Rebalancing.
While both presenters yesterday (Quebecor and CanWest Global) said they wanted to “rebalance” the regulatory system, they meant it in different ways. And Quebecor’s way – where a value for signal regime wouldn’t cause another carrier rate increase – was likely music to consumers’ ears.
Quebecor (which, of course, owns the largest Quebec cable company in Videotron and the most successful French-language broadcaster, TVA) went first and the tone between its executives and the commissioners was far less testy than prior presenters.
This is what we heard on…
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GATINEAU – We could have a story here about the CBC’s plea for a skinny basic.
We could have re-analyzed its re-demands for new revenue in the form of a wholesale fee and how forcefully its executives argued it needs one, despite how detractors point out it already gets a billion dollars from taxpayers and as a public broadcaster an increase from that stream seems more appropriate.
We could have expended more words on Bell’s SD Freesat proposal and how the company re-iterated it will resist new fees to local broadcasters no matter what right to negotiate might be enshrined in…
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GATINEAU – CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein pronounced himself “frustrated” with the months-long public battle between broadcasters and BDUs heading into this morning’s Commission hearing into the future of over-the-air TV.
The public battle lines drawn have the broadcasters in one camp demanding a fee and cable/DTH in the other saying if the broadcasters gain the right to demand one, they’ll fight such a decision and if one does come to pass, the consumer will have to pay much more.
After watching months of back and forth in print, on TV and online, von Finckenstein said he was “frustrated…
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TORONTO, November 16, 2009 – Last week, home improvement specialty channel DIY Network Canada launched a consumer advertising campaign to build awareness of the brand new channel and notify existing and potential subscribers of a free preview currently available through Rogers, Bell TV and Shaw Direct.
DIY, a Canwest channel, launched last month, replacing the Fine Living, as Cartt.ca reported.
The national three week campaign consists of print, radio, on-air and online executions targeting adults 25-54 “with a bulls-eye of 35-year-old males and their partners,” says the release.
Humorous…
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TORONTO – Bell has forged an agreement with Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium to provide its customers with exclusive access to Olympic Games content on both Bell Mobility and Bell TV.
The Consortium, which is the official Canadian broadcaster of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, will provide Bell with 4500 hours of content from its 10 networks in 22 languages, all in high definition for Bell TV HD subscribers.
Bell Mobility customers will also be able to access exclusive, dedicated broadcast feeds from nine venues on their mobile phones, including two “venue feeds” that will provide unedited and…
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GATINEAU – Rogers Cable customers will see some additional interactivity coming to their digital set top boxes in 2010 in the form of multimedia content format Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF).
On Monday in front of the CRTC when talking about new technology with commissioners, Rogers Communications’ vice-president of video product management David Purdy noted the cable company will roll out EBIF applications by mid 2010.
EBIF-driven applications work on any generation of set top boxes and will let Rogers, as well as broadcasters if they choose, enable “real time interactive applications in 30-second commercials in linear broadcasting,” noted Purdy.
So,…
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GATINEAU – After listening to nearly all the words spoken by CTV and Rogers executives and the nine-member CRTC panel (taking over 6,000 words worth of notes and sending out an embarrassing number of tweets in the process), here’s what caught our ear loudest on day one of BNC 2009-411.
Besides the CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein’s wish that he could lock CTV and Rogers in a room and not let them out until you have a deal, that is…
• We now have three terms and their subsequent acronyms to describe what this fight is about: Fee-for-carriage (FFC),…
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IF YOU JUDGED BY the various ad campaigns, Facebook pages and Twitter streams, you’d be thinking that the hearing beginning today in Gatineau is only about whether or not conventional broadcasters should get a fee for their signal.
Well, granting the broadcasters the right to negotiate a fee for carriage of their local TV signals is a foregone conclusion. I’m convinced this will happen. The term “negotiation for value” – which has begun to replace “fee-for-carriage” in the industry lexicon – was coined by CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein himself earlier this year and while I’m not necessarily opposed to…
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TORONTO – While much of the industry’s attention will be focused on a plain, grey building in Gatineau on Monday (btw, anyone else see the irony that the Cable Public Affairs Channel is the only place providing full video coverage of the hearing this week on cpac.ca?), a couple of other interesting items are on the industry docket this week.
Rogers Communications is apparently still set to launch its new broadband video customer portal in a soft launch to certain customers this week.
More irony here… While the closed shop, regulated, OTA, MPEG2 and RF driven system is being debated in…
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