WITHOUT A DOUBT, THE highest profile issue CRTC commissioners will tackle beginning next week’s policy hearings on broadcast distribution undertakings and specialty services is fee-for-carriage. That is, paying a new subscription fee for over-the-air broadcast stations.
As the rules now stand the regulatory bargain is such that cable and satellite and telco TV must carry conventional local TV stations low in their channel lineups and must substitute Canadian signals over top of American ones when the programming is the same. We’ve come to know that part as simultaneous substitution. In return, distributors have not ever had to pay the…
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WE HAVE SOME questions for everyone. Feel free to answer, if you like, at editorial@cartt.ca. Answers will remain confidential – unless you’d like us to make them public… ************ 1. Quick, what’s a two-syllable word, ending in “o” that is a low-cost Canadian wireless brand? With the launch of a new name, Koodo, on the Telus network, we now have three answers to that question – counting Bell’s Solo and Rogers’ Fido. Can someone in marketing can explain to me the reasons why cheap Canadian wireless brand names apparently must end in o? Why is that such a…
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KELOWNA – The Canadian CommTech Trade Show is urging delegates to book soon to take advantage of registration savings. Delegates registering by March 14th can save $10 a day for the show and seminars in Kelowna on May 14-15th.
The show has increased its exhibitor forum by over 30% and will offer 25% more technical training sessions. The early bird rate of $80 per day includes a casual lunch, beverage breaks trade show and 26 training sessions to choose from.
Session topics range from GPON trial updates from Telus and Sasktel to outside plant line conditioning and deep fibre…
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TORONTO – Leave it to Ted Rogers to take a shot at his competition while complaining about regulation – in the same sentence.
During Friday’s conference call with financial analysts, the Rogers Communications founder bemoaned the new rules announced in November by Industry Minister Jim Prentice surrounding the wireless spectrum auction coming in May, but especially took shots at the conditions placed on him when it comes to mandated network roaming for newcomers.
While spectrum has been set aside for new wireless companies, the ministry also said that the incumbents must allow customers of these newbies to roam on…
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GATINEAU – Reply comments filed with the CRTC on Friday on its broadcasting distribution undertakings and specialty services policy review don’t show anyone has changed their minds. They’ve mostly dug right in, as expected.
(And, we’ll set aside the fee for carriage debate right away for this particular piece. Over-the-air broadcasters and producers who look to see more funds flow their way want consumers to pay a fee for conventional TV stations. Cable and satellite companies do not. We’ll dive deeper into the issue in a later story.)
This story, however, is a tale of two extremes. We looked…
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GATINEAU – Internet protocol television (IPTV) is officially on ice for 2008 at Bell Canada.
During Monday morning’s hearing into the acquisition of Bell by a group led by the Ontario Teachers pension plan, CEO George Cope confirmed what was already an open secret, that it has no plans to deliver digital television terrestrially over the Internet backbone until 2009 at the earliest.
CRTC vice-chair telecom Len Katz was inquiring about including the value of Bell’s terrestrial cable license (to be served using IPTV) in the calculation of transaction benefits. Cope confirmed that Bell, with a digital TV service already…
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HAMILTON – Fibre to the home is certainly possible – and from a pure bandwidth point of view, certainly desirable. From an economic point of view, though? Not so much.
And is such a conversion going to happen any time soon here in Canada? Not likely. At least that was the consensus around the lunch table I sat at Tuesday at Carmen’s Banquet Hall in Hamilton during the SCTE Ontario Chapter Winter Technical Conference.
Well over 200 from the technical and engineering side of the cable industry descended on Hamilton to hear 10 speakers wax eloquently about the advantages…
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TORONTO – A new Telus and Angus Reid survey released today shows Canadian women are increasingly relying on their e-mail and Facebook for planning social activities and managing their busy households.
Like the little black dress, e-communication is a must have basic that won’t likely be going out of style any time soon.
According to the January, 2008 survey, 43% of Canadians polled said that they organize their evening social plans by e-mail. Furthermore, women are more likely than men to take advantage of e-mail to organize their social plans (46%), tell their loved ones that they are thinking…
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CALGARY – It’s not as large of a contract as the Telus-Montreal one announced Friday, but Bell Canada sent out a release Monday to let folks know it’s throwing its weight around in Telus’ home territory, too, just like the western telco is pushing into its traditional regions.
Bell Canada said today the City of Calgary has picked it to implement an organization-wide, multi-layered security solution that will enable the city to defend against online threats such as spyware, keyloggers, viruses and hackers.
The URL monitoring and blocking solution will proactively block a wide array of potential threats, including…
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OTTAWA – The new Canadian Centre for Child Protection’s fight against the sexual exploitation of children received significant support from the Government of Canada this week with an investment of $2 million in new funding for the Centre over the next two years.
"This announcement is another concrete action that our government is taking to protect children from online adult sexual predators, and to prevent them from being sexually abused,” said the Honourable Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety, in a press release.
“This funding follows an investment we provided the RCMP to combat child sexual exploitation, as well…
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