Innovation Canada is pledging to regulate what makes up and goes into notice letters, it said as it announced its new intellectual property strategy Thursday. The government is looking to ban demands for settlement payments in the letters, the abuse of which has been flagged as a concern in the past. The notice-and-notice regime, which requires internet service providers (ISPs) to forward letters, came into force in 2015. One critic of the regime was NDP innovation critic Brian Masse, who told The Wire Report in June last year that the government needed to take action on the...
The CRTC will not do anything about a Part 1 application filed by CUPE’s Provincial Council for Communications (CPSC) asking it to drop its regulatory exemptions for digital services because the arguments made in its Part 1 are similar to ones the union has made in the past. The commission said the arguments it’s heard before from the CPSC include the obsolescence of the digital media exemption order, introduced in 1999, which exempts online services from the same regulations as traditional broadcasters, the amount of time since the last review of the order, the growth of the internet...
Rogers Communications Inc. and BCE Inc. have registered to lobby the...
OTTAWA — The chairman of the Senate transport and communications...
Cogeco Inc. has reached a deal with RNC Media Inc. to acquire 10 of RNC’s radio stations.
The deal,...
Advertisers on Facebook Inc. should expect changes — like less reliance on third-party data and better consent tools — to the platform after the privacy breach revelations this spring, says...
Frontier Networks Inc. is turning to the CRTC in a disagreement over whether the small telecom can resell wholesale internet service from Bragg Communications Inc.’s Eastlink, according to a CRTC Part 1 application. Frontier filed the application last week, asking for Eastlink to continue allowing wholesale internet provisioning and service in the midst of a disagreement over third party internet access (TPIA) tariff terms. Previously, Eastlink had asked Frontier to stop reselling its...
Facebook Inc. will add itself to the federal lobbyist registry, the company said after its head of public...
CBS Corp.’s All Access streaming service is now available in Canada, the company said in a press...
The federal government has a new job posting for a CRTC commissioner for British Columbia and Yukon to replace Stephen Simpson, whose term ends June 22. The deadline for applications for the Vancouver-based position, which pays...
The CRTC has opted out of an in-person hearing as it reconsiders its May 2017 licence renewal decision, instead launching a second phase of written consultations. The regulator was told to revisit the decisions made in previous...
Rogers Communications Inc. customers spoke out on social media this week...
Rogers Communications Inc. reported increases in wireless revenue and subscribers in the three months ending March 31, which it said drove its overall revenue up eight per cent over the year to $3.63...
The notice-and-notice regime requires internet service providers (ISPs) to...
OTTAWA — Testimony from Facebook Inc. representatives at the House ethics...
Telus Corp. is launching 4K high dynamic range (HDR) on-demand content on its Optik TV IPTV service, it said in a release Thursday.
HDR is a feature meant to improve picture quality through better contrast and colour output. The release claims that Telus is the first TV provider to directly offer HDR service in Canada.
“4K HDR, enriching the viewing experience with more than a billion available colours, is the new gold standard in TV picture quality,” said...
DHX Media Inc. has appointed a new president, chief operating officer (COO) and created the new position...
The CRTC has ordered four radio stations to a public hearing on June 18 in Gatineau, Que. to answer to commissioners for “repeated” non-compliance of its radio regulations, licence conditions and/or the regulator's mandatory...
Facebook Inc.’s attempt to reach out to members of the Parliamentary...
A British Columbia court said it will not set aside or change a provincial court decision to force...
OTTAWA — Canada’s privacy commissioner told the House of Commons ethics committee Tuesday that the data of the roughly 620,000 Canadians used by Cambridge Analytica could theoretically be used to influence a Canadian election, and called for more oversight of data use by...
The CRTC wants Canadians to weigh in as it considers the candidates competing for a licence for a multi-ethnic channel with mandatory carriage on basic TV packages. It said in a press release...
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) has named Anne Bertrand, the former privacy commissioner for...
Mark Anthony Di Cio has been named director of sales of the Toronto...
The CRTC has turned down a complaint by Unifor against Rogers Communications Inc.’s media division for...
The House Heritage committee will launch a study on “remuneration models for artists and creative industries in the context of copyright” as part of the government’s Copyright Act review,...
Complaints by Canadians about their telecom services increased so much in...
The vast majority of households with Kodi in Canada have the software...
Corus Entertainment Inc. is “accelerating” its transformation into a more data-centric company, its...
Telus Corp. customers in Alberta and B.C. can now purchase its WiFi mesh network product, called Boost Wi-Fi, to extend coverage of home wireless networks, according to a release on Thursday.
Using up to five wireless “boosters” per household, it will “efficiently...
A proposal to implement a website-blocking system to fight piracy has drawn...
Facebook Inc. released its estimates of how many people were affected by...
Despite the impact of cord-cutting on the conventional television space in...
The federal government has announced that mandatory breach notification rules found in the 2015 Digital Privacy Act will come into force Nov. 1 this year, according to an order-in-council dated March 26. As originally reported...
OTTAWA — Catherine Tait’s appointment as head of CBC/Radio-Canada is signalling a shift at the public broadcaster, as she becomes the first woman to lead the CBC and the first to bring extensive content production experience to the role, according to experts.
“I...
Facebook Inc. announced a series of new measures to harden the platform against misinformation Thursday, saying it has needed to ban a Macedonia-based ring spreading fake news during the late 2017 Alabama senate race, and will now...
BCE Inc. 's media division has purchased a majority stake in a Toronto production studio, according to a...
The Quebec government’s 2018 budget, unveiled Tuesday, includes a measure...
A decades-old organization that is pushing for a multilateral approach to decision-making on the future...
OTTAWA — Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan couldn’t tell MPs or reporters...
OTTAWA — Revelations over the weekend that Facebook Inc. data was used...
The issue of whether a Chinese telecom equipment maker poses a security threat by operating in Canada is...
The CRTC is accepting comments on the sale of the Historia and Séries+ specialty channels from Corus Entertainment Inc. to BCE Inc. The regulator said in a Tuesday notice that Bell proposed to direct most of the $20 million in...
Canada’s publicly-traded telecoms lost fewer TV subscribers in 2017 than in each of the previous two years, while they added enough wireless customers to beat last year’s record high of new wireless adds.
A Wire Report compilation of the subscriber numbers reported by...
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) is looking into reports data of 50 million Facebook Inc....
The CRTC has denied a proposal by Sirius XM Canada Holdings Inc. to create...
CBC/Radio-Canada is in negotiations over opening up its French-language...
The owner of iHeartRadio Media Inc., the company that aggregates radio content through its app, has filed...
OTTAWA — Treating social media companies, such as Facebook Inc., as broadcasters could help keep them in line with election regulations and curb unwanted influences resulting from unbalanced perspectives, a law professor at the University of Ottawa argued Wednesday....
Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron is working on deploying its new IPTV service as quickly as possible, Manon...
Apple Inc. is acquiring the magazine app Texture, the company announced Monday.
Texture, which Rogers...
The CRTC is asking telecoms to provide information about demand for high-speed internet as the next step toward implementing the disaggregated wholesale regime in regions outside Ontario and Quebec....
A British Columbia court will not delay hearing a challenge brought by...
The CRTC has approved applications by Ethnic Channels Group Ltd. to add five new channels to the commission’s list of non-Canadian programming services and stations authorized for distribution....
The percentage of anglophones subscribing to TV service fell to 73 per cent in 2017 from 75 per cent a year earlier, according to the latest numbers from CBC/Radio-Canada’s Media Technology Monitor (MTM) project. Continuing...
The privacy commissioner is calling for his office to be included in Bill...
The Canadian Cable Systems Alliance (CCSA) has filed a Part 1...
The government should consider including frameworks for a right to erasure and a right to de-indexing in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), the House of Commons ethics committee is recommending in a new report.
“The Committee...
CBC/Radio-Canada’s coverage of the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Games drew 31...
The 2018 federal budget, released Tuesday, confirmed the Canadian Media Fund (CMF) will receive top ups...
OTTAWA — The 2018 federal budget, released Tuesday afternoon, includes...
Both Dana Landry, DHX Media Ltd.’s CEO, and CFO Keith Abriel are leaving the company, DHX said in a...
Data insights and programmatic advertising that could disrupt digital media’s dominance are factors that could reap longer-term benefits for Canadian telecoms that own media...
Over six years after it was established, a government-funded non-profit initiative seeking to deliver...
The Federal Court of Appeal has ruled in favour of a number of telecoms in their case against the man behind TV AddOns. Last June, a civil search warrant was carried out at a property connected to Adam Lackman following a June...
BCE Inc. is allegedly encouraging its employees to submit comments to the...
BCE Inc.’s Alt TV service is its “underappreciated driver for broadband growth,” Barclays Capital analyst Phillip Huang said in a research...
CBS Corp.’s All Access streaming service is coming to Canada in June, the company’s president and CEO...
CUPE’s Provincial Council for Communications (CPSC) in Quebec is calling on the CRTC to drop the rules that exempt digital over-the-top (OTT) services from the same regulations as traditional broadcasters, in a news release on...
Quebecor Inc. will seek leave to appeal a recent CRTC decision on the...
Corus Entertainment Inc. has confirmed it is eliminating close “to 80...
After hints Britbox was coming to Canada but with no specific date, the British television streaming service officially launched Wednesday.
The contract-free, $9-per-month subscription service teased its availability in Canada when it suggested on its website that it was...
OTTAWA — Representatives from Canada’s biggest telecoms argued that...
Ian Morrison, the co-founder of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, is handing over the reins of the...
The CRTC has approved VMedia Inc.’s application to bring to Canada a channel that helps viewers improve...
BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. both reported quarterly results for the three...
OTTAWA — The idea of of explicitly making net neutrality part of Canada’s laws has been floated in recent days by federal politicians, with a Liberal MP planning to introduce a motion on the subject in the House of Commons and the question popping up at the House ethics...
Viewership of the Super Bowl on CTV didn’t change much from last year, when the channel experienced a...
BCE Inc.’s Bell Media has officially launched a free, ad-supported mobile app featuring video content...
As part of its government-ordered proceeding on future content distribution models, the CRTC is asking a number of companies — including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Netflix Inc. — for information...
OTTAWA — More competition in the over-the-top (OTT) space is driving a trend of more ad-supported...
Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly faced questions this week about why a...
OTTAWA — The Canadian television industry is behind the curve when it...
The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) is estimating that it has broken...
The CRTC has officially launched the Part 1 process for an application asking the regulator to set up an anti-piracy website-blocking system. The Part 1 was posted on the CRTC's website Tuesday...
Creative groups are standing their ground on spending for programs of national interest (PNI), suggesting that a marginal increase in funding for those programs proposed by the large English-language broadcasters last month is not enough to support Canadian content. “About the only virtue of the proposed 6% level is that it is not 5%,” the Directors Guild of Canada said in its reply to the proposal, which were due last week. “DGC does not believe that the [governor-in-council] sent back these decisions assuming the result would be such a marginal improvement in PNI.” That one...
Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains has released a statement on a call by a coalition of broadcasters, telecoms and creative groups to begin blocking websites hosting pirated content, in which he...
A broad coalition made up of Canada’s largest telecoms and broadcasters, as well as groups representing...
The Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has denied BCE Inc.’s request for a...
Proposed legislation intended to combat the marketing of unhealthy food and...
The Canadian government announced Tuesday it has reached an agreement with 10 other countries taking part in the negotiations of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). It said it had achieved concessions on issues including intellectual property and cultural protection in the agreement formerly known as the TPP. The news followed a meeting in Tokyo earlier this week, and a years-long negotiation process that began under the previous Conservative government and saw the United States withdraw from the agreement a year ago. “On culture,...
The CRTC has given Quebecor Inc.’s TVA Sports fewer restrictions on when it can broadcast ads, saying that the channel can now “average the maximum amount of 12 minutes of advertising material...
Viceland, a specialty channel targeting millennials launched as part of a...
Corus Entertainment Inc.’s Nelvana is shaking up its core team, with a new appointment and promotions,...
BCE Inc. said Thursday it has signed a deal with Ericsson AB to use its TV platform, following a similar...
Weeks ahead of the 2018 Super Bowl, BCE Inc., along with the National...
The CRTC has settled a disagreement between BCE Inc. and Quebecor Inc. over the wholesale rate Bell pays for Quebecor’s TVA Sports. “The Commission finds that the evidence does not support the...
Stingray Digital Group Inc. and Birch Hill Equity Partners ramped up their lobbying in December, with both submitting their first communications reports for the year in the last weeks of 2017....
Rogers Communications Inc. said it will buy an Alberta radio station after coming to an agreement with Clear Sky Radio Inc. to acquire the licence of the station. The Medicine Hat classic hits music station CJCY-FM at 102.1...
Britbox, a streaming service showcasing British television, will be “coming soon to Canada,” according to its website.
The contract-less monthly subscription service, driven by the United Kingdom’s BBC and TV broadcaster ITV PLC, is currently available in the...
