TORONTO – An eight-year-old agreement personally put together by Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw explicitly prevents Shaw Communications from buying any cable company east of the Manitoba/Ontario border, says a lawsuit launched by Rogers Communications.
Shaw agreed to buy Mountain Cablevision of Hamilton, Ont., in July for what’s been reported as $300 million. Rogers wants the courts to stop the deal.
Back in 2000, the two companies worked out a swap of cable systems where in exchange for Rogers’ British Columbia systems (about 625,000 subs in and around Vancouver), Shaw gave up the CATV it owned in New Brunswick (almost…
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TORONTO – Last week, Rogers Cable customers received an e-mail from their big red TV provider urging them to make their voices heard in its fight against fee-for-carriage.
Or, if you want to buy into the new vernacular, “value for signal.”
Rogers customers are already a little tender about their bills, having just had under a dollar a month added thanks to the recently established Local Programming Improvement Fund (LPIF), a subsidy for smaller market television stations.
“I am now writing to inform you of yet another broadcasting policy proposal that is under consideration by the CRTC,” reads the e-mail message signed…
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TORONTO – Last week we published a story touting how new wireless company Globalive (to be branded as Wind) wants its primary Canadian banker to remain not only secret, but super-secret, if and when it meets the CRTC.
They would like to bring a representative from the bank in to its September 23rd hearing to tell the Commission how challenging it is for such a start-up to raise the money needed to launch in a competitive wireless marketplace dominated by three huge players, among other financial matters.
(The Regulator, due to concerns voiced by a number of people and companies,…
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TORONTO – Bloomberg News is reporting that Rogers Communications has launched a lawsuit against Shaw Communications seeking to prevent the latter from purchasing Mountain Cablevision.
According to the story, which is available here, Rogers contended in a hearing yesterday that it has a pre-existing arrangement with the Calgary-based Shaw that neither would infringe on the others’ territories when it comes to expansion in cable.
It wants the $300-million deal stopped so a trial over the Roger-Shaw non compete agreement can happen and lawyers in court yesterday suggested that this is just a first step for Shaw back into Eastern Canada.
More…
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GATINEAU – While a CRTC hearing into the levels of foreign ownership in new wireless entrant Globalive is set to begin on the 23rd of this month, Rogers Communications this week sent a letter to the Regulator asking for the same treatment of two other newcomers, Public Mobile and Dave Wireless.
“Since the 2008 AWS auction, many questions have arisen regarding the ownership and control of several of the successful bidders,” reads the Rogers letter to CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein. “Many of the auction’s participants included foreign partners in order to raise the necessary capital. These concerns were directed…
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EVERY YEAR AT THIS TIME, both because it’s fun and because we want the weekend off… we re-publish the top 25 stories from the last 12 months.
The other reason why we do it now and not in January is that September, just after Labour Day, is the “new year” for broadcasters. The new fall shows are coming out and speaking from a regulatory perspective, too, the 2009 broadcast year ended August 31st and we are into a new year.
After spending hours pouring over our analytics to identify the top stories, I can say it has been a very busy…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC will require the owners of Canada’s biggest distributors and broadcasters to publicly disclose aggregate financial data.
Ownership groups such as Astral Media, BCE, Bragg Communications, CBC, Canwest Media, Cogeco, Corus Entertainment, CTVglobemedia, Newcap, Quebecor Media, Remstar Broadcasting, Rogers and Shaw, must file confidential and public aggregated annual return forms with the Commission by November 30 of each year. The filing requirement for the aggregated annual returns, which will begin with the 2007-2008 broadcast year, are due by September 14, 2009.
The public data will be posted on the Commission’s website. The Commission announced in April that the…
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TORONTO – Cable giants south of the border (Comcast and Time Warner) are pushing their TV Everywhere concept hard and Canadians, according to new data from Solutions Research Group, like the idea, even though Canadian cablers haven’t yet launched anything (but one is close).
Nearly 7-in-10 Canadian TV viewers say being able to access their cable channels on the web or mobile is an “excellent” (26%) or “good” (41%) idea, says SRG, with a younger demographic liking it even more.
Among the key findings of SRG’s Digital Life Canada research:* Web TV may be an important tool to stay…
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FIVE OF Canada’s biggest cable companies have complained to the CRTC for extending a filing deadline – two days after the deadline had already passed.
Calling it “both unprecedented and unacceptable”, the heads of regulatory affairs from Bragg Communications, Cogeco Cable, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications and Quebecor Media on behalf of Videotron, (collectively, the Cable Carriers), sent a sternly worded letter to CRTC Secretary General Robert Morin on Thursday expressing their collective “deep frustration” with Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2009-261-4.
“…The Cable Carriers want the Commission to understand the deep frustration that the companies feel at having made…
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TORONTO – CTV has developed a “strategic retention strategy” with Rogers Cable that will see 17 of its hit programs become available on a new, CTV-branded channel on Rogers On Demand.
Beginning Wednesday, the CTV content will be available to consumers on Rogers’ channel 100 following their original television broadcast. The deal allows viewers the opportunity to catch up on last week’s missed episode, before next week’s new episode airs on CTV or its /A\ channel’s.
"Almost all of the programs we’ve targeted for the service are serialized, which are often challenging to keep up with in today’s busy world,”…
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