Videotron released its Q2 numbers and it is proving that the company is having success in offering a compelling bundle of services – TV, internet and telephone.
Videotron has always taken a different approach from the other 2 major Canadian cable companies (Shaw and Rogers). Aggressive pricing for local phone service; pushing hard on the internet gas pedal. A wireless component is getting added to the bundle on Thursday.
Among the top items to glean from the release: Videotron grew its Q2 cable base for the first time in 10 years. You need to understand that it seems the entire province of Quebec moves on June 30 because of overly paternalistic micromanagement of the apartment rental markets. But that is another story.
48% of our sales of residential telephone service were to new customers and 70% of them took all three of our products
You have to like what Robert Depatie is doing. A fresh perspective on the telecom sector from a guy who comes from consumer foods (Heinz and Planters).
We have written about privacy in the past, including a few posts during the last week of June, when AT&T made changes to its privacy policy. There is an opportunity to look at privacy issues in depth, coming in October.
The International Privacy Officers Network (IPON) is meeting in Toronto on October 17 to discuss “Canada’s Unique Privacy Challenges: Employment, Outsourcing, Federal-Provincial Jurisdictional Issues“. The meeting is taking place a day before the International Association of Privacy Professionals holds its 6th annual Privacy Academy conference.
The IPON session is being run by our good friends at Privacy Laws and Business, a consultancy of specialists headed by Stewart Dresner. Stewart has been a leader in privacy matters for more than 20 years.
By attending this one day event, you will:
Learn the most important things you need to know about how privacy issues are regulated in Canada;
Understand how the private sector is impacted both in the provinces which have specific private sector privacy laws (Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec) and those which do not;
Focus on the specific issues IPON members have told us they most need to grapple with, including employment issues and outsourcing;
Exchange experience with your peers on how you and they manage compliance with privacy laws in Canada;
Have an opportunity to make timely recommendations to the federal legislature’s review of the private sector law.
For some time, I have been planning a post to discuss blogging about blogging. The Toronto Star’s article on The worldwide whatever makes it the right time to weigh in.
I had been noticing the number of communications industry bloggers talking about how blogs are getting to be more important. Blogs are getting to be taken seriously, duhhh. Bloggers writing about blogging.
I won’t link to any of the egregious examples, in order to protect the guilty, some of whom owe me lunches, coffees or whatever.
As David Olive of The Star wrote on Sunday:
Bloggers, mostly one-person operations with no reporting staff, scalp much of their content from the mainstream publications and network broadcasts they mock for their slow-footedness. Bloggers have not set the agenda in politics, science or any other realm.
“The blogosphere is not a hothouse where brilliant new ideas are generated by the self-described iconoclasts who populate it,” says Rick Salutin, media critic at The Globe and Mail. “The main qualification for blogging is that you failed to get a mainstream media job. Writers on the Web tend to be in touch only with other bloggers, not people in the street.
Mark Evans said ‘Ouch!’ to that comment – but he is both a blogger and a journalist.
It could be worse. You could be Adnan Hajj, a photographer for Reuters (a mainstream media outlet) who was caught ‘enhancing‘ a photo for propaganda effect. In that instance, it was bloggers who caught what Reuters termed photo editing software, improperly used on this image.
Hmmm. Olive’s article is a little too strong, but it is effective in opening some discussion points.
Self-congratulatory blog content sounds too similar to the way Torontonians used to say (or still say) that their hometown was a world-class city. Let’s face it. Real world-class cities don’t have tell people that they are world-class. They just are.
Blogging about the importance of blogging is self-indulgent. A form of infinite regression. (Of course, that leads to the question of where does this blog entry fit?)
It is a very different matter to recognize the phenomenon of diverse sources of content creation and attempt to identify business opportunities that arise from such a transformation.
It was likely in this vein that Business Week features Digg on its cover, although the shabby quality of the report itself has been widely discussed (see Mark Evans, Rob Hyndman and Om Malik, among others). Again, we see that ‘mainstream media’ can sometimes fail to apply the level of editorial standards that would enable traditional outlets to leverage their brands in the Web 2.0 environment.
Can anyone seriously question that there are fundamental shifts underway in societal interaction and information distribution? I think Nike has it right. Just do it.
Keep blogging. We’ll figure out the rest as it happens.
Update: In an attempt to demonstrate its adherence to a higher standard, Reuters has now pulled the entire body of work by Adnan Hajj.
A couple of general wireless industry notes, now that Rogers, Bell and TELUS have all released their numbers:
Total wireless industry revenues are up 17% and subscribers are up 11% – average revenue per user is up across the board as subscribers buy more data, messaging, etc.
All three wireless carriers are showing improvements in their churn figures. Fewer people are switching carriers. We think that this is due, at least in part, to customers standing pat with their current carrier waiting until number portability allows them to take their number with them in March 2007.
TELUS is following up on its launch of the Moto Q for business users and is now targetting the cool space with exclusive relationship for the sale of Amp’d branded services in Canada. It appears that TELUS is taking aim at Virgin and continuing to leverage relationships, products and market intelligence that it can glean from Verizon.
