OTTAWA – The Competition Bureau is seeking to have the Competition Tribunal add more time to the pre-hearing process and hearing on the merger of Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications due to Quebecor subsidiary Videotron’s request to participate in it.
The Commissioner of Competition filed a motion today seeking the changes, which would see oral examinations for discovery start on Sept. 19, 2022, instead of Aug. 15, 2022, as currently scheduled.
The commissioner, Matthew Boswell, is further requesting the tribunal include an additional week for oral examinations and another additional week for the hearing. He is requesting the tribunal modify other…
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TORONTO – Jorge Fernandes is no longer Rogers Communications’ chief technology and information officer.
While no official announcement has been made, the company’s leadership page on its website indicates Ron McKenzie (above) was made the company’s chief technology and information officer in July 2022. A Rogers spokesperson confirmed the change happened yesterday.
“Rogers can confirm Jorge Fernandes will be stepping step down from his role as Chief Technology and Information Officer,” reads a statement from the spokesperson. “Effective immediately, Ron McKenzie becomes Chief Technology and Information Officer.”
The change comes nearly two weeks after Rogers networks went down across the country.
Fernandes…
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TORONTO — toober, a Toronto-based live television app*, announced earlier this month it has launched six new channels.
Launched in June, the new channels include Euronews English, Euronews French, RAI Italia, RAI World Premium, RAI News 24 and Universal Vision TV (Spanish, Portuguese and English programming).
toober “aims to fill a gap in the live streaming market by providing subscribers access to all of their favourite channels from around the world at one low price,” a press release says.
The toober app is currently available in Canada on Rogers, Shaw, Videotron, Apple TV and Google TV Playstore. It will launch globally…
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QUEBECOR PRESIDENT AND CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau released a statement yesterday criticizing an opinion piece published in the Globe and Mail last week, which itself criticized the pending merger of Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications generally and the sale of Freedom Mobile to Quebecor as a remedy for competition-related concerns about the merger specifically.
The opinion piece was written by Centre for International Governance Innovation fellow Keldon Bester (who co-founded the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project) and Carleton University PhD candidate and consultant Ben Klass in the wake of the nationwide Rogers outage earlier this month.
Péladeau is calling three…
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THE LEAD PARAGRAPH in your July 14th story on the success of Blue Ant in global markets begins:
“A CONSTANT REFRAIN from Canadian broadcasters is they do not have the heft to battle U.S.-originating streaming services, and so need protectionist relief from the feds to survive a post-cable, border-straddling future.”
I can’t say I have ever heard Canadian broadcasters say they need protectionist relief or else they can’t expand into global markets. In fact I expect Corus and Videotron would hotly deny that (while asking for less regulation) while Bell and Rogers would say the same thing, but perhaps in more diplomatic language.
On…
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TORONTO — Sports-first live streaming service FuboTV and StackTV, Corus Entertainment’s multichannel streaming service, announced today StackTV’s suite of content is now available as part of a new FuboTV premium subscription package.
Available to Canadian subscribers for $34.99 per month, FuboTV’s premium package bundles StackTV’s suite of programming with all 23 channels of FuboTV’s “essentials” package, which includes Premier League, Serie A, OneSoccer, CBC, beIN Sports, Paramount Network Canada and TYT, plus Fox Sports Racing, Big Ten Network, euronews, africanews and others, for a total of 42 channels in the package, according to information emailed to Cartt.ca by a FuboTV…
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SEATTLE – Telus was Canada’s fastest national mobile operator and Shaw was the fastest fixed broadband service provider amongst the country’s top providers in the second quarter of 2022, according to Seattle-based broadband and mobile network testing company Ookla, which released its Q2 2022 results today.
Mobile
Ookla reported Telus had a median download speed of 79.09 Mbps. Bell, meanwhile, had a median speed of 72.46 Mbps and Rogers had a median speed of 60.36 Mbps. (Please see chart above.)
Rogers, however, had the fastest median upload speed for Q2 2022 at 9.21 Mbps compared to Telus (7.98 Mbps) and Bell (7.42…
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By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – The House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology (INDU) adopted a motion this afternoon by Liberal member of parliament Han Dong to conduct a study and hold two special meetings before month’s end to investigate the Rogers Communications Inc. outage that left an estimated 10 million wireless and 2.25 million retail internet subscribers across Canada without service.
“The public is owed some answers,” said Dong, who represents the Ontario riding of Don Valley North.
His motion calls on the committee to review the causes of these widespread disruptions; the impact the service outage…
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WINNIPEG – Xplore Mobile announced today it will be shutting down service as of Aug. 31, 2022, due to regulatory delays.
A letter to customers on the company’s website indicates while it was able to overcome “start up issues of our own making,” competition and the Covid-19 pandemic, it was unable to overcome the “cloud of uncertainty” caused by regulatory delays.
This includes delays around the CRTC’s mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) process, as well as “the high roaming rates that significantly exceed retail prices,” the letter says. (While the CRTC issued a decision on regulating MVNOs last year, it has…
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Expert group concludes work with little attention given to website blocking proposal
By Amanda OYE
OTTAWA – The work of the government’s Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety, which was appointed in March to provide advice on the government’s proposed approach to dealing with harmful content online, has come to an end with the summary of its final session being posted online last week, but the government will continue seeking input on the matter from Canadians and stakeholders throughout the summer.
“I thank the expert advisory group for their work,” said Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez in a statement emailed to Cartt.ca….
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