OTTAWA – The one thing most everyone agrees on is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be announcing a Cabinet shuffle early next week.
According to multiple reports, all ministers have been told to be in Ottawa this weekend and next week, meaning that the PM may have major changes in mind and not just some minor tweaking (Gordon O’Connor is certainly gone from National Defense, they say). But what will it mean for the two ministers overseeing the cable, radio, television and telecom industries?
Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, by any measure, has been a very successful minister who,…
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CALGARY – Some of its customers will probably say "finally" as Shaw Communications announced today it will add the NHL Centre Ice package to its viewing options on Shaw Digital Cable and Star Choice DTH.
The NHL Centre Ice package consists of at least 1,000 regular season and selected play-off games from the first two rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Centre Ice customers will have access to over 40 games per week drawn from a variety of regional and national networks in Canada and the U.S. In addition, over 200 games in the Centre Ice package will be…
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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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TORONTO – Rumours in the media that Rogers Communications Inc. is considering merging with Shaw Cable are just that, says RCI president Ted Rogers.
Reporting on the idea is “just plain irresponsible” and “completely theoretical diatribe,” Rogers told analysts today during a company conference call on second quarter earnings.
“We have a lot on our plate,” Rogers said. “We are in as good a shape as we’ve ever been” and the company is focusing on smaller acquisitions and has “no appetite for dilutive transactions.”
“We do not have any active file on Shaw,” Rogers said. “I would be hard-pressed to call…
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FOR SALE: ONE SMALL, independent cable company. Reasonable price. Best offer.
Kaslo Cable is one of a very few remaining independent cable systems. It’s an older system that doesn’t offer high speed Internet nor digital cable to its 300 or so customers – which is part of the reason they want to sell, says co-owner Kul Nijjar. She wants to see a new owner foot the bill for the expensive upgrades needed to go digital.
In lieu of a classified ad explaining the company is for sale, Nijjar (pictured below) chatted with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien on…
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VANCOUVER – Manual J. Saperstein, founder of Whistler Cable, died on Saturday at Vancouver General Hospital due to complications following heart surgery.
Despite the relative size (about 8,000 subscribers or so) and isolation of his cable company, Saperstein was known across Canada for his technical know-how and willingness to take risks. It’s not well known that Whistler Cable was one of the very first to experiment with voice over Internet protocol telephony in 2005.
According to former Delta Cable president John Thomas, Saperstein was "the ‘engineering consultant to Western Cable interests’, and largely responsible for the establishment, from an…
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WHITBY – After a short undercover police investigation into the theft of satellite signals, Durham Regional Police arrested three men on Friday.
Project Orbit took place in June and grew from an earlier investigation in Port Perry where a man and woman were charged with providing access to illegal satellite television signals. That investigation identified several other businesses in Durham Region in which satellite systems were sold and encryption codes provided to illegally access television and audio channels, said the press release issued late Friday on the matter.
Undercover officers attended two businesses to purchase satellite equipment (pictured below)…
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CALGARY – Shaw Communications’ basic cable subscribers increased by 3,289, digital and Internet customers grew by 20,875 and 27,873, respectively, digital phone lines were up by 51,128, and Star Choice customers increased by 5,337 in the third quarter of fiscal 2007, ended May 31st.
That means the company, as of May 31, has 2,228,898 basic subs, 747,431 digital cable customers, 1,421,899 high speed Internet customers, 877,899 DTH subscribers and 343,753 VOIP customers.
Consolidated service revenue improved 12.1% and 12.7%, for the three and nine month periods over the comparable periods last year to $702.2 million and $2.06 billion, respectively….
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CALGARY – Shaw Communications shareholders approved the company’s proposed two-for-one stock split of its outstanding class A participating shares and class B non-voting participating shares late yesterday.
The split will be effective as of the close of business on July 30, 2007.
Shareholders of record on the 30th will keep their current share certificates and will be provided with additional share certificates representing the class A participating shares and class B non-voting participating shares to which they are entitled as a result of the stock split.
The shares will begin trading on a divided basis on those exchanges, respectively,…
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