CALGARY and OTTAWA – Shaw Communications’ DTH company Star Choice announced today it will offer a Star Choice Mastercard through MBNA Canada Bank.
MBNA Canada is a leading provider of co-branded and affinity credit card programs in Canada.
Star Choice customers can now choose between the Star Choice Platinum MasterCard and the Star Choice Preferred MasterCard. As an exclusive promotional offer, for those customers who choose to use their Star Choice MasterCard on a pre-authorized basis to pay for their Star Choice service, they will receive $50 in programming credits.
The Star Choice MasterCard provides existing customers with another…
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THE CABLE INDUSTRY MIGHT not like reading this, heading into the local forbearance hearings next week, but residential phone choice seems pretty real to me.
If there was any doubt about it, my local newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, delivered ample evidence last Wednesday. In the mess of inserts I curse about that usually flutter out of the thing, three glossy direct marketing pieces caught my eye: One from Primus; another from Rogers; and the third from Direct Energy.
Primus was a pure low-cost sell. “Get TalkBroadband and save big on your home phone service,” it said, beside a garish…
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TORONTO – Manitoba Telecom Services president Cheryl Barker said Tuesday that the company recently added its 45,000th digital television customer, meaning the Manitoba telco now serves over 20% of all TV customers in Winnipeg.
During a panel session at the BMO Nesbitt Burns Media and Telecom conference Tuesday in Toronto Barker said that the company hit the mark on September 5th (leaving unsaid the sizable dent the figure put in Shaw Cable’s customer rolls in the city).
MTS TV is a digital subscriber line delivered digital TV service which offers three streams of digital TV and high speed Internet to…
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TORONTO – Sonic hit the shelves this week, a new music magazine developed by Max Trax, Galaxie and Toronto-based ad agency ZiG. It’s a free bilingual consumer publication “for music lovers with a thirst for knowledge and a desire to constantly expand their music collection,” says the press release. Sonic (Volume I, Issue I, at right) will be distributed to all Canadian cable and satellite providers beginning the week of September 12.
The 20-page premiere issue features rock icons U2 on the cover, as well as articles looking at seven genres of music found throughout the…
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THIS IS A BIG JOB. No wonder Rogers Communications Group’s president and COO Nadir Mohamed doesn’t want to talk about succession. He’s got lots on his plate to worry about now, rather than what his next job might be.
Besides, last week’s National Post Business article beat that story to death (and then some) last week.
What we wanted to know is where the company’s priorities lay. What’s job one for him rightnow? How is he going to bring together two disparate groups (cable and wireless, together a $5 billion business), two completely different technological platforms, into a cohesive,…
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THERE IS SO MUCH on the docket for lawyers working the telecom file in Canada these days, it’s almost hard to keep track.
The CRTC begins its hearings into forbearance from regulating the local phone market on September 26th (same week as Cable Week) while at the same time Industry Canada is deep into its Telecom Policy Review. Then there’s the Federal Court appeal of the CRTC’s telecom win-back rules and the ILECs’ VOIP decision appeal to cabinet, among other things.
So how will a coherent national telecom policy be developed from this muddle of related…
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EDMONTON – The Edmonton Oilers have announced their 2005-2006 TV schedule, which will see all but four of the 82 regular season hockey games televised.
Fifty of the 78 broadcast games will be on Rogers Sportsnet West, with 12 games on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, 10 exclusively available on pay-per view, and six on TSN.
The pay-per-view games will be available to customers of Bell ExpressVu, Star Choice, and Shaw digital cable. The first Oilers pay-per-view special will air Nov. 3, when Edmonton visits Detroit. Pricing will be announced later.
The Oilers’ home opener is Oct. 5 against…
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WHILE WE CAN’T SAY for sure that Compton Communications will be the smallest North American video on demand provider when it launches this fall, we figure it’s pretty unlikely that many other 5,000-customer cable companies in Canada or the U.S. are planning on offering it that soon.
It’s a very expensive technology, fraught with difficult to solve issues, especially for a small operator. Think Paramount’s EVP of programming will have Compton’s VOD launch on his priority list, for example?
Compton Cable (which serves the Port Perry, Ont. region, about an hour’s drive northeast of Toronto, on Lake Scugog) has…
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – As if the voice market wasn’t crowded or confusing enough, Google Inc. yesterday launched Google Talk, a downloadable Windows application that enables its Gmail users to quickly and easily talk or IM with their friends for free.
Google Talk is not voice in the way that carriers such as Bell or Rogers or Shaw or Cogeco or Primus offer it. Those carriers offer voice service the way most people use it – on the phone. Google Talk is chatting via computer
"Google Talk further enriches our users’ communications experience, whether they choose to communicate via…
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TORONTO – Corus Radio Toronto today announced the appointment of Gord Harris as program director at AM 640 Toronto.
Harris was most recently PD at Corus stations AM 980 and The Hawk in London. A veteran in the industry, he operated a private radio consulting business in the early 1990s and has worked with Broadcast News, WIC, Rogers, Standard and CHUM (including 680News and CFRB).
His educational background spans the fields of economics, political science, law and film, and he currently teaches journalism courses at Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario.
Harris replaces Scott Armstrong who was…
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