TORONTO – If it can’t buy ’em, it looks like Rogers might overbuild ’em.
Rogers Cable has applied to the CRTC to extend its cable territories in Ontario to include a chunk of Cogeco Cable’s Ontario wheelhouse: Oakville, Burlington, Milton and Halton Hills, as well as into tiny Aurora Cable’s market in Aurora, just north of Toronto.
A move like this may signal a stark departure from the historically collegial cable industry where each company kept to its own territory and expanded by purchasing other cable companies. (Aurora and Cogeco are both known not to be for sale, however.)
In…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The CRTC today denied Shaw Communications’ request to add USA Network to the list of eligible foreign satellite services for digital distribution.
Shaw asked for the new addition in January, saying the general interest cable channel available to 90 million in the States, would be attractive to customers.
Shaw also wanted Commission to alter its approach to adding non-Canadian services to the digital lists. The company wants the Commission to automatically approve the addition of all general interest non-Canadian services, and that it permit broadcasting distribution undertakings (BDUs) to distribute services on the eligible lists on…
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by Myron Love
WINNIPEG – Larry Updike’s top-ranked morning radio show on CJOB/68 can now also be seen on cable television (Shaw TV, Channel 9). The simulcasts started on Monday, September 10.
Updike has been hosting the morning show for the past seven years. The CJOB Morning Show has consistently had the largest audience (per share) of any radio show in Canada.
The simulcast is a collaboration between Shaw and Corus Entertainment (Shaw and Corus share the same controlling family). The arrangement augments Shaw TV’s programming and is largely for their benefit, Updike notes.
He says that CJOB is…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Time to revive all the old jokes that CRTC stands for “Can’t Release ‘Til Christmas”.
The Commission today confirmed that the complex issues facing a decision on what to do about the Canadian television fund were too much to consider prior to the previously-set September deadline.
A December decision means it will have been about a year since Shaw Communications tried to blow up the fund by withholding payments and saying it would rather give money claimed from cable and satellite bills for the CTF, back to its customers. Quebecor Media’s Videotron soon followed suit.
This is…
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JAY SWITZER HAS IT bad for the Canadian TV industry.
After less than three months out of work, the former CEO of CHUM Limited dearly misses the people he has worked with for over two decades and the work of providing hours of TV programming to Canadians.
The self-professed "content guy" – who spent some time this summer riding into the sunsets of the U.S. southwest – is not about to ride into the sunset and retire. He’ll be back, but he has months to decide where and when.
Last week, he sat down with Cartt.ca editor and publisher…
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ANYONE WISHING A BIT of a preview of January’s hearings on broadcast distribution undertaking and specialty services policy changes need only speed through Shaw Communications intervention in the CanWest Global/Goldman Sachs purchase of Alliance Atlantis proceeding.
The three page document outlines in very brief terms what Shaw – and likely other cable companies – will be looking for once that policy review comes around.
Shaw didn’t object at all to the proposed merger but the company rarely misses a chance to state its case on where it believes the regulator should be heading.
"In combination with other recent…
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IF THERE HAS BEEN a Canadian television channel that has struggled more with its programming, carriage, ownership and identity than OUTtv, which began its life in September 2001 as Pridevision, we don’t know of it.
The original category one digital specialty service license went to a surprising place to begin with. The CRTC, preoccupied at the time with trying to uplift smaller broadcasters, gave the must-carry digital license to what then was Headline Media, the owners of what has become The Score, a straight-male all-sports station where no one had experience in the gay community.
Granted, Headline did partner…
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REGINA – In co-operation with the CBC and Shaw Communications, Access Communications Co-operative’s community channel, Access7, will re-telecast the CFL football game played on Saturday, August 18 between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Edmonton Eskimos.
During the fourth quarter of the game, the power went out at the stadium and interrupted the game for almost an hour. When the power finally came back on, the CBC didn’t come back to the game, instead showing a movie rather than the fourth-quarter comeback by the Roughriders. The CBC did show the rest of the game in Saskatchewan, however.
Tonight the game…
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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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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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