With Score Media buy, Rogers ups its bet on sports

By Chris Sorensen - Monday, August 27, 2012 at 12:08 PM - 0 Comments

Rogers Communications Inc. is doubling down on its bet that sports—particularly live sports—will continue to be a draw for its cable TV audience, which is increasingly being bombarded with Internet-based options like Netflix.

Rogers (which owns Maclean’s) has struck a deal to add Score Media to its expanding stable of sports content for $167 million. Rogers plans to fold the Score Television Network, with 6.6 million subscribers, into its larger Sportsnet television brand. If approved by regulators, the deal will also give Rogers a 10 per cent ownership stake in the Score’s digital properties such as mobile apps.

While The Score has struggled to compete with both Sportsnet and Bell Canada’s TSN franchise, Rogers believes its mix of quirky commentary and focus on more niche sports like college basketball and professional wrestling will augment its more mainstream sports properties, further expanding audience reach. “We continue to pursue opportunities to engage, expand and enhance the experience for sports fans,” said Keith Pelley, the president of Rogers Media, in a statement. “The Score is a tremendous sports service that offers a distinct flavour of premium, niche programming that fits squarely within our strategy of delivering highly sought-after content to Canadians.”

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Do Canadian cops need warrants for GPS tracking?

By Jesse Brown - Friday, April 13, 2012 at 12:51 PM - 0 Comments

The American Civil Liberties Union recently shocked Americans with news that dozens of police departments across the country were tracking suspects through the GPS chips in their phones without any court oversight. American cell providers such as AT&T and Sprint were routinely handing over real-time location data of their own customers to police, without requiring warrants. Sprint even created an easy-to-use web portal to automate the process, and provided police with a private data price-list. For example, $30 buys police a month of realtime location tracking data on a suspect. The ACLU’s findings also uncovered indiscriminate GPS dragnets–the police could buy info from cell carriers that allowed them to identify every individual found nearby a certain cell tower. There seems to be no consensus and few precedents in American law on the legality of such methods, and police are making the most of this murkiness.

So is it happening in Canada, too?

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Rogers Communications turns 50

By Mitchel Raphael - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 3 Comments

Rogers Communications  celebrated their 50th anniversary in Ottawa at the Metropolitain Brasserie.

(Left to right) Rogers president and CEO Nadir Mohamed and Rogers Vice Chairman Phil Lind.

(Left to right) U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.

Liberal MP Justin Trudeau.

Loretta Rogers.

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How the federal competition bureau ‘is shifting the game’

By John Geddes - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 1 Comment

Peter J. Thompson/National Post/CP

In Stephen Harper’s Ottawa, it’s not often that a public official makes a sustained splash. The Prime Minister prefers his bureaucrats quiet, diplomats discreet, and even high-level appointees, like Governor General David Johnston, unobtrusive. In this circumspect climate, Melanie Aitken, the commissioner of competition, stands out. As head of the federal Competition Bureau—the independent agency that enforces laws on anti-competitive behaviour—Aitken has taken on everyone from the real estate industry, to credit card companies, to airlines. The bureau has gone from largely invisible to impossible to ignore. “We are trying,” Aitken says, “to increase the accountability of companies that have taken advantage of Canadians, and show that there are consequences.”

Those consequences hit home for many last year when she pressured the Canadian Real Estate Association into opening up its Multiple Listings Service to brokers who don’t charge full-service fees. She is taking Visa and MasterCard before the quasi-judicial federal Competition Tribunal to try to end their practice of forcing merchants to accept all cards, including premium plastic that comes with higher transaction fees. In the telecom sector, Bell Canada agreed to pay a $10-million penalty after Aitken accused the company of advertising lower prices than were available, and she is pursuing Rogers Communications (owner of Maclean’s) over what she calls “misleading advertising” involving a discount cell service.

When was the last time the bureau was fighting on so many fronts? According to John Rook, a competition lawyer at the Toronto firm Bennett Jones, never. “It’s unprecedented,” says Rook, who worked closely with Aitken when she was at his firm, and sometimes takes on cases for her bureau.

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Muting a bitter TV battle

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

NATHAN DENETTE/CP

Investors barely batted an eyelash last week when phone giant BCE revealed it had struck a $1.3-billion deal to buy CTV, the country’s top television network—a deal that continues a significant reorientation of the media landscape that began with Shaw Communication’s purchase of Global TV earlier this year. The reason? There are no immediate winners or losers. No one has figured out a way to benefit from owning both TV content and the “pipes” that deliver it to consumers—at least, not yet.

In fact, the only one that appears poised to come out ahead in the near-term is the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The country’s broadcast watchdog has spent the past few years at the centre of an ugly fight between Canada’s ailing broadcast networks—CTV, CBC and Global, among others—and satellite and cable firms like Bell, Shaw and Rogers Communications (which own Maclean’s magazine) over the concept of “fee for carriage.” Dubbed a “TV tax” by Bell, Shaw and Rogers, the idea is that cable and satellite firms should be forced to pay for carrying the networks’ over-the-air signals on their services—an argument that’s now been rendered moot by the recent takeovers. “Fee for carriage doesn’t mean anything when the content owners and the content distributors are one and the same,” says Carmi Levy, an independent analyst.

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Coming now to a TV near you

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Traditional television needs a fairy godmother. Or maybe a visit from a knight in shining armour. Perhaps that’s why Rogers Communications, one of the country’s largest media companies, is betting on the man who was at the helm of Walt Disney Co. when it launched hit titles like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.

Last month, Rogers (which owns Maclean’s) announced plans to invest millions in Vuguru, a Web video studio launched by former Disney chairman Michael Eisner—the man credited with reviving the Magic Kingdom at a time when Disney was flailing financially. The investment bought Rogers a minority stake in the venture, which will produce around 30 Web series every year, each made up of “mini-sodes” that are a few minutes in length. It may be Rogers’ foothold into what many see as the future of television. Continue…

Guts, foresight and Edward ‘Ted’ Rogers

By Steve Maich - Monday, December 15, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

In business circles, calling somebody “a shooter” used to be a mark of high regard. Shooters were gutsy, bold and willing to take risks that others would not. The term has fallen out of popular use in Canada, perhaps in part because we have so few true shooters anymore. These days our Titans tend, for the most part, to be low-key strategists adept at protecting the franchise and building brands, but not overly concerned with conquering new ground or placing themselves at the forefront of emerging industries.

Ted Rogers, CEO of Rogers Communications—the company that owns this magazine—died last week after a long struggle with heart problems. It would be tempting to say that Rogers was a shooter, but that wouldn’t take the full measure of the man. To put his achievements into perspective, it’s best to turn to the words of an anonymous industry analyst who spoke about Rogers’ amazing career in a profile for the Financial Post, back in 1989—when his greatest successes hadn’t even yet been realized. “He pioneered FM radio, cable and cellular telephone in this country. That’s not just an accident,” the analyst said. “Someone once said to me that Ted Rogers is a real shooter. He’s not a shooter; he’s a marksman.”

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Ted Rogers: A visionary leader

By Peter C. Newman - Thursday, December 11, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

No one equalled his daring.

Ted Rogers spent most of 50 years in business guided by his viscera and the message on his business card that carried the self-designated title, “Senior Salesperson.” His profession was selling himself, and he succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings. Ted’s reputation had been forged as an entrepreneur extraordinaire—the high-wire trapeze artist of Canadian business. But by the end of his life he had turned himself into the indispensable alpha presence within the Canadian communications community who recognized, harnessed and marketed the technologies of the future. While he was known better for being a risk-taker than a pioneer, the two strains came together to define his personal brand.

He prided himself on being the kind of entrepreneur who thrived as much on risk as its rewards. From a modest start, as the owner of a one-station FM network, and his moves into cable, then wireless and iPhones—he was always there, ahead of his Canadian competitors, suffering the penalties of being the innovator in a country where anybody who survives puberty thinks they’re ahead of the game.

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Five easy secrets

By Ted Rogers - Tuesday, December 2, 2008 at 8:16 AM - 0 Comments

In his autobiography, Relentless (HarperCollins), written with Robert Brehl, Ted Rogers offered his five rules for entrepreneurial success:

Do I have any special insight into entrepreneurialism? Can what I learned over my life somehow help budding entrepreneurs? Have I found the “secret sauce” of entrepreneurialism? Those are heady questions, but over the years I have travelled through entrepreneurial valleys and climbed many peaks. Often I am asked, what is the secret to my success and how do I handle the enormous stress of being an entrepreneur when everything is on the line? The answers do not fit into a nice little box tied up with a ribbon because situations and people are different. What worked for me may not work for someone else. But I shall do my best to address them from my perspective.

First I should mention that I have always looked for industries just starting to grow. The momentum of growth has made up for a lot of my errors and has carried my companies. Second, being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It requires a healthy appetite for risk and a belly that can digest setbacks, even failure. I learned early that failure is a necessary component of success and an entrepreneur cannot let setbacks sideline him or her from objectives. Continue…