OTTAWA – Canada’s telecommunications companies have launched an agency to hear complaints from consumers that can’t be resolved by the telcos or the CRTC.
The office of the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS) opened its doors in Ottawa on Monday. It was created in response to a request from Industry Minister Maxime Bernier that telephone service providers work together to create an independent, industry-funded agency to handle complaints that fall outside the CRTC’s jurisdiction and that consumers and small businesses have been unable to resolve directly with their service provider. The request was tied with the federal…
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TORONTO – Score Media now has 120 days to find a buyer after minority shareholder Alliance Atlantis turned down a chance to buy the company whose central asset is analog sports channel The Score.
Score’s primary shareholder Levfam Holdings, which is controlled by Score Media’s CEO John Levy, put the company in play last month by offering its shares to Alliance Atlantis for $2.90 per. At the time, Score Media’s shares were trading at $1.60. Today, its share price is off over 6% down to $1.92.
The shares were offered to AA "pursuant to a Respective Rights Agreement made…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Canadian broadcasters have offered at least tepid support for a Rogers Cable application to the CRTC to alter the video on demand regs to allow for greater advertising flexibility in the VOD platform.
Some of those organizations which filed an intervention on the issue added that a decision on what Rogers wants should be deferred and discussed under the upcoming review of broadcast distribution undertaking policy recently announced by the Commission.
As the rules stand right now, ads within video on demand content must have already appeared on a linear Canadian TV channel, there must be a…
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TORONTO – Rogers Sportsnet is teaming up with TSN and its sister network, RDS, to provide wall-to-wall live coverage of the Canada/Russia Super Series, starting August 27. Together, the three sports networks have secured exclusive Canadian broadcast and digital media rights, in both English and French, to the eight-game hockey tournament.
English-language coverage will be divided between TSN and Sportsnet, with TSN televising Games 1, 4, 5 and 6 and Sportsnet airing Games 2, 3, 7 and 8. RDS will broadcast all eight games in French. All games will also be available live and on-demand on broadband at TSN.ca,…
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OTTAWA – A new telecom report recently published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that mobile phone customers in Canada enjoy some of the most competitive wireless prices around, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association said today in a press release.
"According to the OECD’s recently published biennial Communications Outlook 2007, Canadian customers fare significantly better than their neighbours in the US and Mexico in almost all usage categories," reads the release from the wireless industry’s lobby group.
"This report, as well as other recent studies, offers even further evidence that true competition in the wireless…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Remember 1997? Almost nobody had the Internet and even fewer had satellite TV. Digital cable barely existed. VOD was a lab engineers dream. HD was nowhere to be found and PVR still only meant player value ranking.
Tier III, with such brands as The Score, HGTV, History Television, and Teletoon, launched that fall. Titanic was the top-grossing film. Worldcom and MCI had announced their $37 billion dollar merger (which, of course, failed spectacularly and helped marked years of doom for telecom and related stocks), and we were all glued to our news channels for a time that…
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TORONTO – The OMNI brand will live on in Vancouver after all. Rogers Media announced today that it will buy the city’s multicultural station, Channel M, from Multivan.
The acquisition of Channel M will significantly expand Rogers’ ethnic television operations into the rather diverse lower Vancouver mainland and Vancouver Island markets, which are home to three million residents.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The station will copy Rogers’ successful multicultural stations in Toronto, branded OMNI. Once the deal is done, Channel M will become OMNI. Right now, Rogers owns an OMNI-branded station in Vancouver, but it…
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OTTAWA – CanWest Media Works Inc. is arguing CRTC approval of its $2.3 billion acquisition of Alliance Atlantis Communications would “create a viable and healthy competitor for CTVglobemedia in the domestic broadcasting television sector.”
The Winnipeg-based broadcaster also tells the CRTC to view the purchase as “both a reflection of, and response to, changing dynamics, trends and technologies in the domestic and international media industry (esp. a rapidly fractured media landscape; changing viewing patterns and erosion of media boundaries).”
The comments were made in CanWest’s application seeking CRTC approval of the acquisition. The documents were made public Friday, when…
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TORONTO – While cable companies in Canada will have to convince the Regulator first, the changing experience Stateside when it comes to video on demand shows the platform is growing beyond its premium movie transactional business model into an ad-supported, free-to-consumer channel as well.
In a two-hour session put together last week for Rogers employees, the company’s programming partners and CTAM Canada members, Rogers Cable vice-president, television, David Purdy outlined some of the successes his company has had in the VOD space, from the TMN SVOD model where 50% of TMN viewing by Rogers customers is now done on…
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TORONTO – On Canada Day (a day the company is fond of doing big things) Rogers Communications successfully completed the intracompany amalgamation of RCI and its wholly owned subsidiaries Rogers Cable and Rogers Wireless that was announced on May 14, 2007.
The amalgamated entity continues as RCI, and Cable and Wireless are no longer separate corporate entities and have ceased to be reporting issuers, says the company.
The amalgamation does not impact the consolidated results previously reported by RCI. In addition, the operating subsidiaries of Cable and Wireless are not part of and are not impacted by the…
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