LAST YEAR AT THIS time, Kevin Crull was into week three of his transition from long-time telecom executive to the leader of the largest Canadian broadcasting company.
Now president of Bell Media, the company which owns the CTV and CTV2 conventional TV networks, 29 specialty channels including market leader TSN, 33 radio stations and the Sympatico.ca portal, Crull came over from Bell Canada’s telco side, having run Bell Residential Services for five years. For a decade prior to that he was a senior executive with AT&T and US West.
One of his final projects at Bell Canada was writing the business…
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CALGARY – Shaw has added Astral’s Disney XD in standard and high definition, Family Channel HD and Disney Junior to its cable lineup.
The family-focused channels are available now on free preview through January 10, 2012, and associated video on demand content will be added in December. The new channels and VOD content will join nine existing channels as part of Shaw’s ‘Family Pack’, while the HD channels will join its ‘HD Plus’ package.
“We’re proud to include this additional content to our already broad selection of family programming,” said Shaw president Peter Bissonnette, in the announcement. “With the launch of these…
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WHILE WE’VE YET TO hear back from the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Bell Canada or Telus – and Industry Canada hasn’t yet responded to our request for a better answer to our original question, Canada’s two largest cable companies have responded to our plea that our country come up with a plan to get broadband Internet access to low-income families.
As we reported, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission along with many cable companies and other contributors, have devised a program to offer broadband connectivity to low-income families for…
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CALGARY – Shaw has chosen Motorola’s DreamGallery software to provide its customers with a more personalized and intuitive content management system, the companies announced Tuesday.
A cloud-based HTML5 video tool suite, DreamGallery allows for the creation of custom, operator-branded guide experiences through animations, filtering and an easy-to-use Web-like interface. Designed to deliver the SocialTV and TV Beyond the TV experiences, it also allows operators to deliver the on-screen experience across devices such as smart phones, tablets, PCs and connected TVs, regardless of operating systems.
Shaw will begin launching DreamGallery on Motorola HD set-top boxes that support both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 service delivery.
“Our…
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GATINEAU – Rather than picking one system over another, the CRTC has chosen to give the large Internet providers the choice in how they charge small competitors who use their networks. The commission has, however, rejected Bell’s bid to charge on an aggregated volume basis, instead opting for a capacity-based approach.
In its much-anticipated usage based billing decision, the Commission chose capacity as the proxy over an aggregated volume method. Bell Canada and Rogers Communications Inc. advocated for the latter approach.
Bell suggested during the hearing that a capacity-based approach would result in independent ISPs keeping traffic volumes high resulting in…
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GATINEAU – Cartt.ca reporter Perry Hoffman will be in the media lockup this afternoon at 2:30 prior to the CRTC release of its latest decision on wholesale Internet usage-based billing.
Whatever the decision, brace yourselves for waves of misinformation on what the decision means, especially since the decision will likely take time and a lot of number crunching to figure out what it all means. The decision is the result of a re-think of the Commission’s prior wholesale UBB decision, which federal cabinet made many noises about forcing the Regulator to re-visit after enduring a substantial public outcry.
However, in the end, the…
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READERS MIGHT HAVE sensed with my column Thursday that I am taking the issue of getting broadband to low-income families very seriously. I called the fact that we have nothing in Canada to help the poor get broadband in their homes embarrassing, especially when compared to the ambitious and comprehensive Connect 2 Compete program that was launched in the United States this week by the Federal Communications Commission, numerous cable companies and other firms.
Then, reporter Peter Nowak reports today that Canada is the ONLY country in the G8 with no assistance…
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OTTAWA – Industry Canada should open up the TV white spaces spectrum in the broadcast band below 698 MHz on an unlicensed-basis, many companies are telling the department in its consultation on the as-yet used spectrum.
Earlier this summer, the department kicked off a consultation seeking input on the best ways to make the spectrum available. Cartt.ca reported on SMSE-012-11 in September. Companies tell Industry Canada that making white space spectrum licence-exempt will benefit consumers because of its ability to increase communications options.
Shaw Communications, which recently abandoned plans to deploy a mobile…
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TORONTO – National Geographic Channel has kicked off a new national advertising campaign highlighting the 125-year-old yellow frame synonymous with the brand.
The campaign, which began this week, replaces the letter ‘O’ with the yellow frame in the words “whOa,” “mindblOwing,” “heartpOunding” and “explOsive” in the creative. A combination of visuals and captions promotes the channel’s fall lineup which includes series such as Locked Up Abroad, Frontier Force, The Indestructibles, Rocketmen and Mad Scientists.
The marketing elements include print advertisements in the Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald and the Edmonton Journal plus an online buy on specific life and entertainment-centric websites. A 30-second promotional commercial…
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CALGARY – Shaw has launched its new inter-city fibre-optic network capable of carrying Internet, voice, video and data at 100 Gigabits per second (Gbit/s).
Shaw said Tuesday that the network has the capability of carrying up to eighty-eight 100 Gbit/s channels over a single pair of fibres, meaning it can handle up to 133 million voice calls, 440,000 HDTV channels, or transmit 44 Blu-ray Discs in one second.
Enhancements to the fibre-optic network will benefit both residential and business customers by providing new services, speed and reliability that is part of the Shaw Internet experience, the company’s announcement continued. The launch follows…
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