TORONTO – Happy 25th Birthday TSN.
The self proclaimed “Canada’s Sports Leader” is marking the event with a cross-country promotional tour, the launch of e-store TSNShop.ca, the release of a coffee table book called TSN 25 Years, a TSN25 micro-site on TSN.ca, and the debut of a revamped on-air look for its flagship daily show Sportscentre.
So what’s changed since the station launched from its modest facilities in Don Mills, ON back on September 1, 1984?
“Pretty much everything”, laughs president Phil King in an interview with Cartt.ca.
King, a chartered accountant by trade, started with TSN in 1989 in its programming…
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TORONTO – While the 2010 Winter Games are still months away, pre-Olympic programming started Monday night on Canada’s Olympic broadcast media consortium’s array of television networks and promotional partners.
From athlete profiles, to a look back at Olympic greats, to no less than 10 hockey-themed specials, it seems as though there will be no shortage of build up and hype across CTV, Rogers Sportsnet, TSN, RDS, RIS Info Sports, OMNI, OLN, APTN, Discovery Channel, Bravo!, NHL Network and V, the rebranded French network TQS which is available in Quebec over the air, and nationally on cable and satellite.
“The plethora…
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TORONTO – These are busy days for Boris Culum, the winner of the SCTE’s first Young Canadian Engineering Professional of the Year award.
The manager of voice network planning at Rogers Cable has been an important part of the massive growth of the company’s Home Phone product, which has gone from essentially zero to nearly 900,000 wireline customers in just over four years.
While the service is still growing (adding 21,000 customers in the last reported quarter, ended June 30th, for Rogers), that growth has slowed this year as its penetration among basic cable customers approaches 50%.
Culum and the eight senior…
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ALEXANDRIA, VA – Rogers has picked up four nominations for the 2009 CTAM Mark Awards, to be handed out October 26 at the CTAM Summit in Denver.
The MSO received nominations in the ‘Acquisition and Upgrade Marketing/Campaign’ category for Rogers Cable Q4 TV Superiority: HD; in the ‘Competitive Marketing/Campaign’ category for its Rogers Hi-Speed Internet Superiority campaign; in the ‘Multicultural Marketing/Campaign’ category for The Whole World Plan – New International Long Distance Launch campaign; and in the ‘Traditional Direct Response Marketing/TV Spot/Promo (Non Campaign)’ category for Loading Bar DRTV.
Teams of marketing and agency executives chose the finalists over five days of judging…
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TORONTO – Errol Hinds spent the early part of this summer assuring people that Setanta Canada was doing just fine, thanks.
The reason? The company’s U.K. subsidiary went under, losing English Premier League soccer and other rights on its way to the dustbin.
“I don’t know a huge amount of what happened there,” said Hinds, Setanta Canada’s general manager in a recent interview with Cartt.ca of the British Setanta channel. “The way Setanta is set up though is that it is different entities in different countries… so our rights deals were independent of the English company.”
However, that bit of bad news…
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WHILE WE WAIT for the CRTC to decide whether or not Al Jazeera English can be distributed in Canada by cable, satellite and telco TV companies, I already have it in my office.
Actually, I have both the English and Arabic versions, right now, on my television. (No Canadian BDU offers the Arabic version because even though it’s on the eligible satellite list, the regs around it say that BDUs must employ Arabic language censors to monitor it 24/7, if they want to launch.)
And yet, here they both are, in standard definition, full-screen quality, on my 30-inch LCD television thanks…
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OTTAWA – After renewing the broadcasting licences of Rogers’ OMNI television stations for another six years, the CRTC has denied its request to broadcast ethnic programming during "peak" time, and to remove the conditions of licence relating to the overlap of programming between OMNI and Rogers’ Citytv stations.
The Commission did approve Rogers’ request to “harmonize” its requirement for Canadian programming across all of its multiethnic OMNI stations. It further agreed to amend the requirement of CJMT-TV Toronto (OMNI.2) for the provision of ethnic programming in order to harmonize it with the conditions of licence of the other OMNI stations, and will…
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DAVE LEWIS HAS BEEN at this satellite thing for a long time. Thirty-one years, to be exact.
He’s worked for Telesat, Alphastar, Cancom/Star Choice, Lincsat and Ciel – just about every satellite company in the country. And he says there’s no way existing Canadian BDUs can offer up all channels in high definition without multi-billion-dollar upgrades which would include a massive consumer set top box swap-out program.
He believes the best way to deliver local-into-local TV signals – and his new company would deliver every OTA broadcaster in Canada – in high definition (including 1080p), is to start over with a…
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TORONTO – Rogers Cable launched its new 50 Mbps Internet service Tuesday to select parts of the Greater Toronto Area.
Called the Rogers Ultimate High-Speed Internet, the service is available for $149.99 a month, and offers respective download and upload speeds of up to 50 Mbps and up to 2 Mbps, plus a monthly usage allowance of 175 GB. The service will be rolled out further in the coming months.
"We are excited to once again bring such innovative technology and leading edge speeds to our customers, making it an ideal service for gamers and multimedia enthusiasts alike," said Chris Draper, VP of…
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PARIS – Canadians pay some of the highest prices in the world for their cell phones, says a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But do we really?
According to OECD calculations, rates charged by Canadian mobile providers rank behind only the United States and Spain as the highest in the developed world, while Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden have the cheapest rates.
But Canadian telecom consultant Mark Goldberg says that “the OECD service definitions should cause serious researchers to laugh”.
The survey, called the OECD Communications Outlook, compared domestic prices across countries for low, medium…
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