Canadian Olympic Consortium’s Keith Pelley at the Vancouver Olympics.
Unable to put a value on coming Olympic Games, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Bell Media have walked away from their partnership rather than put together a new bid for exclusive Canadian television rights.
The broadcasters have been locked in negotiations for more than a year with the International Olympic Committee for the 2014 Sochi and 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. The breakup raises the possibility that no domestic broadcaster will be willing to meet the financial terms demanded by the IOC.
While the Games have traditionally been ratings hits for Canadian broadcasters, they are expensive to secure and produce. Despite the success of the Vancouver 2010 Games, for example, the domestic broadcast consortium of Bell Media and Rogers Media lost money.
The loss prompted Rogers to withdraw from any further bids.
“This is a very high level of brinksmanship we’re seeing,” said Gord Hendren, a president at Charlton Strategic Research Inc., a market research group that has worked with the IOC in the past. “I can’t imagine we won’t see a broadcaster step forward at the right price at some point.”
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Conrad Black speaks to the Empire Club in Toronto Friday afternoon. Here’s what he said last time he stood before them, in 2006.
Howard Stern is one of satellite radio’s biggest draws.
After years of mounting losses and with competitors emerging from every side, Sirius XM Canada wants to renegotiate the terms of its licence to save millions of dollars a year and put it on a more even footing with the traditional radio industry.
The Toronto-based satellite radio company’s licence is up for renewal for the first time since it was issued in 2005, and its executives will ask the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to cut its mandatory contributions to artistic development funds by about 90 per cent.
While radio stations are enjoying one of their best years ever, Sirius XM Canada faces the same problem plaguing newspaper publishers and television broadcasters – consumers are finding content for free, and turning away from subscription based services that require them to pay.
“Sirius XM Canada has been losing money at a disturbing rate,” the company says in a filing to the CRTC.
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The Conservative government has taken “the unusual step” of publicly challenging a newspaper report and reminding journalists across the country that it’s their job to get both sides of a story before racing to publication.
In an open letter, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said the ministry wasn’t approached about an article that appeared in Montreal’s La Presse on June 11, about a Colombian woman facing deportation.
A sharp rebuke from the country’s broadcast ethics regulator hasn’t chastened Sun News Networks’ Ezra Levant, who said there’s no reason for him or his network to apologize for an on-air Spanish slur that roughly translates into “go have sex with your mother.”
Mr. Levant railed against Chiquita Brands International in December, after it said it would stop using fuel from Alberta’s oil sands. Mr. Levant challenged the company’s ethical record, but the Canadian Broadcast Standards Councilwas more concerned with a portion of the show when he stared into the camera and told a company executive “Hey you, yeah you, Manuel Rodriguez. Chinga tu madre.”
The network initially argued the word “chingar” has several meanings, including “get lost” and “stop bothering me.” But Mr. Levant said Wednesday that he used the term in the most literal sense.“Of course I did,” he said, arguing that there is no law against swearing on television. “Are you telling me that this is illegal to say in Canada?”
The ethics panel – which is funded by broadcasters – received 22 complaints, all of them referring to the slur.
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