OTTAWA – If 2006 was the year of local forbearance and the fight over deregulating the wireline phone market, 2007 will be the year newcomers and incumbents wrestle over wireless.
In fact, the lobbying has already begun. Last week, as reported by Cartt.ca, Quebecor Media CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau told Ottawa’s Canadian Club that the cozy oligopoly of existing players keeps prices high, stifles innovation and ensures new wireless applications already available in other countries are slow to market in Canada.
On Monday at the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, a large roomful of wireless regulatory lawyers, financial analysts,…
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STREAMING THE TORONTO MAPLE Leafs online seems like a no-brainer. The team seems to have an insatiable, unlimited fan base.
But, there is much to consider when turning a sports team to the web, especially one that is limited to its own region. Just like LeafsTV is limited to Ontario (except Ottawa), so must any games carried on line be limited to viewing in the same geographic area.
Plus, the web experience can’t be just a rebroadcast of the televised game, otherwise, what’s the point, asks Chris Hebb, Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment’s senior vice-president of broadcast.
Hebb oversees…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has added NASA Television to the list of foreign TV channels eligible for carriage in digital in Canada, despite objections from CTV’s Discovery Channel.
The CRTC noted in Broadcasting Decision 2007-43 that it found “the overlap between NASA TV and The Discovery Channel or Discovery HD is minimal and that NASA TV is sufficiently different in terms of target audience, service orientation, programming genres and programming to be considered neither partially or totally competitive with The Discovery Channel or Discovery HD.”
The request to bring the U.S. channel featuring documentaries, archival programming and coverage of…
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WHILE SITTING IN TUESDAY morning’s IPTV session at NAB 2007 in Las Vegas I was reminded of the Sesame Street song: “One of these things is not like the other.”
You know how the rest of it goes, asking kids to pick out the thing in a group of objects that doesn’t belong. Unlike Sesame Street, during this morning’s session kids wouldn’t have been able to tell by looking, but once everyone started talking, it would have been easy.
The panel this morning, led by Carmel Group’s Jimmy Schaeffler, consisted of executives from Verizon, SES Americom, OpenTV, and Qualcomm….
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TORONTO – Canadian Satellite Radio Holdings reported a second quarter loss of $15.8 million Monday, an improvement over the same quarter of 2006.
In releasing its financial results, based on hitting 237,500 subscribers, the company reported revenue for the three-month period ending Feb. 28, 2007 of $4.9 million, also an improvement over the same quarter in 2006.
“We are pleased with our performance this quarter and are confirming our position as Canada’s premium digital audio entertainment and information company,” said John Bitove, CSR’s Chairman and CEO.
“We will continue to build our subscriber base through innovative partnerships such as…
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OVER 100,000 FOLKS from the global broadcast industry (including Cartt.ca) will descend on Las Vegas next week for the National Association of Broadcasters annual convention.
The five-plus-day event will feature what’s new in the electronic media world, including HDTV, IPTV, mobile TV, telco TV, digital radio, broadband video and audio – not to mention the thousands of new hardware and software developments that can be found among the exhibitors. These are the widgets that are the engine of any radio or TV station, of course.
Headliners at NAB 2007 include Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt, Microsoft TV’s Peter…
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TORONTO – Former Rogers Communications executive and current leader of Ontario’s Conservative Party John Tory is stepping back into the telecommunications world – at least briefly. He is giving the luncheon keynote speech on Monday, June 11 at the 2007 Canadian Telecom Summit.
The event, which runs until Wednesday, June 13 at the Toronto Congress Center, includes the participation of the telecommunications industry’s biggest names. Virgin Mobile Canada President and CEO Andrew Black, Motorola President and COO Greg Brown, Videotron President and CEO Robert Depatie, CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein, Mitel Chair Terence Matthews, Nortel CTO John Roese, Competition Bureau…
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TORONTO – The CBC has acquired the broadcast rights, including video streaming, to Toronto FC, Canada’s first Major League Soccer (MSL) club, it was announced Wednesday.
CBC Television will broadcast 14 regular season Toronto FC games, including the expansion franchise’s April 28 home opener against the Kansas City Wizards, while cbcsports.ca will video stream all of the CBC broadcasts live and on-demand.
Toronto FC and MLS highlights will be available on-demand over the Internet as well.
CBC Sports acquires the exclusive rights to the MLS Playoffs, MLS Cup and July 19 MLS All-Star Game in 2007 under the deal,…
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SO FAR, SO GOOD for wireless number portability, says Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association president and CEO Peter Barnes.
There have been few issues the association has had to solve since March 14, the day Canadians could take their phone number with them, no matter which telephony carrier they chose to acquire service.
A more contentious, far less decided matter, is the upcoming Industry Canada wireless spectrum auction. The association’s majority want a free, unfettered auction but certain factions want constraints on the existing players so that newcomers may bid for spectrum and win. The CWTA is even holding a…
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THAT SOUND YOU HEARD from Ottawa late Wednesday afternoon was that of Industry Minister Maxime Bernier jangling his keys to the shackles Canada’s incumbent telephone companies have said repeatedly they are burdened with.
The regulations holding back Bell Canada, Telus, Bell Aliant, MTS, SaskTel and the other smaller ILECs are on their way out far sooner than the CRTC perhaps envisioned when it made public its local forbearance decision a year ago tomorrow.
In that decision, the Commission set out a number of conditions that had to be met before any traditional incumbent telco could be granted deregulation. Until…
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