KELOWNA – “This show has grown by leaps and bounds,” Capella’s Wayne Rabey raved this morning on a crowded floor at the 2008 Canadian CommTech Show and Seminars.
Between 250 and 300 people went through the Coast Capri Hotel on Wednesday, a day after the event’s successful golf tournament on Tuesday.
While the seminars went on (we’ll have a story or two from those, too) we perused the show floor for products and this is what some of the 60-plus companies were highlighting. ************ TVC CANADA was featuring a couple of fibre-to-the-home solutions, including air-blown fibre solutions and Corning’s…
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REGINA – The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. is asking the CRTC to force direct-to-home satellite TV distributor Star Choice to pick up the public broadcaster’s over-the-air TV signal that it dropped last week. “CBC/Radio-Canada files this complaint against Star Choice on the basis that Star Choice appears to be in breach of its condition of licence which specifies that the number of CBC English-language owned and operated television stations distributed by the licensee never falls below the number of English-language conventional stations distributed from any other individual broadcast group,” Bev Kirshenblatt, CBC senior director of regulatory affairs, writes in a…
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OTTAWA – The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) is charging that Bell Canada has contravened the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) by using deep-packet inspection technology (DPI) to control traffic over its Internet lines.
DPI reveals what subscribers are using their connections for, to find and limit peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent. Bell has said it needs to ensure traffic over its infrastructure doesn’t slow down, and DPI is aimed at optimizing its network.
CIPPIC, a University of Ottawa-based legal clinic specializing in Internet law, though noted in a May 9 letter to the Privacy…
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CAMPBELL RIVER, B.C. – At their regular monthly meeting held on Monday, the board of directors of cable co-operative Campbell River Television met with representatives of Shaw Cable concerning the big MSO’s continuing interest in the potential acquisition of CRTV.
Shaw Cable announced just last week that it had received the go-ahead by the CRTC to overbuild in CRTV’s cable territory, if it wishes. Such a move would certainly devalue CRTV’s sale prospects.
In a press release to its 13,000 customers/members the board wrote that in “light of the fact of increased competition in Campbell River plus the reality that…
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GATINEAU – The CRTC has told Shaw Communications it may require the communications giant to file monthly reports on how its community channels are not violating the regs.
Twice in the past two years, Shaw Cablesystems community channels have been rebuked by the Commission for showing advertisements on its cable community channels.
In the Broadcast Distribution Regulations , cable companies are not allowed to air traditional ad spots and there are limitations on the types of sponsorship messages, or advertising, community channels can air. The regs also say sponsorship messages can contain only 15 seconds of…
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TORONTO – Limited in our questions as we were (no talking about iPhone, no talking about the advanced wireless spectrum auction), here’s a pretty good taste of what we media types who cover Rogers Communications asked about during Tuesday’s press conference just prior to the RCI AGM (we omitted the questions about the Blue Jays and their dismal start to the season, however). ************* About the AWS auction, and the fact they wouldn’t talk about it, said CEO Ted Rogers: “If you’re going to bid on a Rembrandt, you don’t want to talk about it ahead of time.” *************…
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CALGARY – The feud between one of Canada’s largest cable companies and one of its smallest took another turn Monday when Shaw Communications announced the CRTC had issued an administrative decision allowing the company to extend the authorized service area of its Courtenay B.C. cable system to include the community of Campbell River.
Campbell River is currently served by Campbell River Television, a community-owned cable co-operative with about 13,000 customers.
As Cartt.ca reported, Shaw made an offer to buy the company last fall, but the membership turned it down, so it looks like Shaw is ready to overbuild…
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GATINEAU – Of all the submissions we’ve heard over the past three weeks, Channel Zero’s boiled the issues down very well, kicking of its oral remarks on Wednesday.
Cal Millar, vice-president and general manager of the company which owns Silver Screen Classics and Movieola said he believes the hearing is about Canadian programming and the fact that the consumer doesn’t really care about all the machinations going on within the CRTC or any of the broadcast and distribution companies.
“Canadians don’t say to themselves: ‘I want to spend money on cable or satellite’,” explained Millar. “They say ‘I want…
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GATINEAU – Shaw Communications is so opposed to any type of fee-for-carriage for conventional broadcasters that it wouldn’t even consider a hypothetical question on the matter yesterday.
During the hearing into the policies governing broadcast distribution undertakings and specialty services, which wrap up today in Gatineau, commissioners have been asking such questions of intervenors for the entire hearing, forcing companies and their executives to ponder “what if” scenarios from genre protection to a shrunken basic cable package.
But clearly, the most contentious issue facing the CRTC policymakers from this hearing is the potential for a fee-for-carriage being paid to…
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WHERE IS JIM SHAW? is what CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein wanted to know Wednesday morning when he moseyed into the hearing room in Gatineau and spied the Shaw Communications panel, minus its CEO, facing him.
It’s more than a fair question. The Shaw Communications CEO has lobbed several virtual grenades into Ottawa of late, most notably challenging the existence of the Canadian Television Fund throughout 2007, and then declining to appear at the hearing into the CTF earlier this year – telling a newspaper that since von Finckenstein wasn’t leading that hearing, it amounted to a Commission…
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