TORONTO – Saying that the proposed sale of Alliance Atlantis violates Canadian media foreign ownership rules, the Coalition of Canadian Audio Visual Unions has told the CRTC the deal must be stopped.
CanWest Global Communications and Goldman Sachs agreed in January to acquire specialty broadcaster Alliance Atlantis for $2.3 billion in an unusual deal which will see Goldman provide most of the equity and retain ownership of the CSI TV show franchise while CanWest would get control of the Alliance Atlantis specialty channels. A new company which would contain the CanWest TV assets and those from AA, whose board…
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TORONTO – Personnel substitutions are the name of the game this off-season at Canada’s most venerable sports property as new on-air faces and a new executive producer will take Hockey Night In Canada into the 2007-08 National Hockey League Season.
Still-new executive director of CBC Sports, Scott Moore, has wasted little time overhauling parts of the broadcast, and may have rebuilt the on-air duo he once had when he was in charge at Rogers Sportsnet in Jim Hughson and Craig Simpson.
While Hughson was already on board, Simpson – who had been an Edmonton Oilers assistant coach since…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Shaw Cable has received partial approval from the CRTC to air some kinds of commercials on its video on demand service.
The commission has approved Shaw’s application to show programs containing commercial messages when the program has already aired in Canada on a Canadian channel. It’s also allowed to charge a fee to subscribers to watch those programs containing commercials.
But the regulator denied Shaw’s request to show programs with commercials that had already aired in Canada but on a non-Canadian channel that’s on the list of eligible foreign satellite services.
The decision applies to Shaw’s wholly…
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ALBERTA IS BOOMING, and so are its airwaves. Calgary is getting four new radio stations in the latest licence award by the CRTC. One of the most recent to launch was Fuel 90.3, a second Calgary FM station for Halifax-based Newcap Broadcasting, which has been operating california 103, a smooth jazz/blues station, for five years. Fuel pulled in respectable numbers in its first BBM ratings period, according to the spring book just released.
The aptly named Fuel hopes to cash in on the region’s energy boom with a “Triple A” format—adult album alternative. At the helm is Stephen Peck,…
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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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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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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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