DELTA, B.C. – One of the original British Columbia cable systems, Delta Cable, is changing hands.
Persona Communications agreed to purchase the 38,500-customer cable company based in Delta, B.C. (including its Coast Cable operation) late Wednesday. President and CEO of Delta, John Thomas, the son of late company founder Stan Thomas, is said to be retiring.
Financial terms were not released and the deal is pending CRTC approval.
Stan Thomas, one of the industry’s true pioneers, founded the cable company in 1954 and was one of the creators of the Canadian Cable Television Association, which first met in 1957….
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YELLOWKNIFE – After a year of successful operation in the north, Northwestel is launching its NetKaster satellite high speed Internet service in the south.
NetKaster has been expanded to communities throughout Alberta, expanding on its current service in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, launched a year ago. The company will target rural and remote areas not already served by cable or DSL Internet service.
NetKaster is powered by Telesat Canada’s Anik F2 satellite. The service is the result of an agreement between Northwestel Cable and Telesat Canada. Both Northwestel and Telesat are owned by Bell Canada.
"We developed this…
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TORONTO – "This year’s second quarter EBITDA is greater than the full EBITDA of 1996… the six months EBITDA is higher than the full year in 2002," Rogers Communications CEO Ted Rogers said this morning in unveiling the company’s second quarter results, for the three months ended June 30th.
Consolidated revenue grew 29% to $2.24 billion in the quarter and consolidate operating profit increased 31% to $742 Million.
As for individual customer figures, wireless postpaid ARPU grew 6.9% and postpaid Churn fell to 1.27%. Residential and business local telephony lines have passed 735,000
All three of the company’s operating…
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TORONTO – The move won’t help Canadian subscriptions to the NFL Network for the next few years, but TSN’s latest programming addition will make more NFL games widely available in Canada.
Today, TSN and the National Football League announced the network has secured exclusive Canadian rights to the NFL’s Thursday/Saturday eight-game regular season broadcast package, beginning this season and continuing through 2008 (which means the games on the NFL Network will be blacked out in Canada).
Stateside, the league has kept these games for itself, and will be airing them on its own NFL Network, which is available in…
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CALGARY – Corus Custom Networks, the division of Corus Entertainment that books and runs ads on Shaw Cable’s TV listings channels, introduced a new format for its TV Listings Channels (pictured) on Tuesday.
The company will roll out the new design (pictured below) in 77 markets across Western Canada throughout the summer. The TV Listings Channels will shift from a vertically-split to a horizontally-split format that displays the TV Listings guide along the bottom half of the screen with the top half split into two advertising blocks.
One block will feature advertising in conventional 4 x 3 broadcast format, enabling…
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TORONTO – Suppliers Telonix and Sunrise Telecom are hitting the road in September and October to update the engineering and technician community on all those flowing 0s and 1s.
A series of four half-day seminars (morning or afternoon, your choice) are scheduled for September 12 in Montreal, September 14 in Halifax, October 3 in Toronto and October 5 in Calgary. They’re $50 each.
Shawn Armstrong on Telonix and John Samoluk of Sunrise will host and cover topics from basic knowledge of digital signals and key terms and acronyms, to downstream and upstream issues and an architectural overview.
For more information…
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BOSTON – The future weighed heavily on the minds of marketers at this week’s Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing Summit held in Boston Monday to Wednesday. ********** At first glance, having the vice-president of product marketing from Neustar – a third party provider of local telephone number portability for network operators – seemed a bit of a stretch. But, said John Ticer, he’s in a unique position, having to deal with wireless, wired, VOIP and cable telephony providers and make their systems talk to one another.
Each of those networks and their companies were developed "in stovepipes" aimed at…
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TORONTO – Don Iannetta of Toronto will get a $10,000 Sony entertainment system and a free subscription for a year for being Rogers Cable’s one millionth digital cable customer, the company announced today.
The company said its "dramatic growth in digital penetration is evidenced by the 187% increase from December 2003 until the company reached its millionth customer in June 2006.
"Rogers On Demand on channel 100 is fantastic. I’ve been able to watch all kinds of programming and movies whenever I want. My favourite so far was being able to watch all of the FIFA World Cup soccer…
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VANCOUVER – Canadian production company Shavick Entertainment has purchased gay and lesbian digital specialty service OUTtv, but the release touting the sale has a key fact wrong.
The purchase price was not announced and the deal is subject to CRTC approval. This is the second time the category one digi-net launched in 2001 has been sold. The service has had its problems.
It was originally launched and owned by Score Media and named Pridevision. It aired a variety of gay and lesbian programming as well as many hours of adult content late at night. The adult content scared some…
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OTTAWA – After consulting with the space players over the past eight months, Industry Canada today called for applications to fill satellite slots over Canada.
The launch of this licensing initiative to authorize the development of Canadian satellites says that up to 29 satellite licences may be assigned. It will be the largest spectrum licensing initiative ever undertaken in Canada. A comparative competitive licensing process will be used in which applicants will be required to submit proposals to Industry Canada but license winners will be expected to have birds operational in the 2008-10 time frame.
"We need to increase…
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