Shaftesbury Films and CBC fared well at the first round of this year’s Gemini Awards – scoring highly in the drama and talk categories, respectively – though the pubcaster saw its would-be sweep of the news and doc honors spoiled by Global.

Rogers Communications has urged the CRTC to open the Canadian airwaves to more foreign channels, as the regulator gets set to write new rules for domestic cablecasters, satellite services and other content carriers.

TV and radio execs from across the country meet next month in Ottawa for the annual convention of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. Every November – whether it’s signal theft or the Internet – it seems like there’s always a new problem on the minds of broadcasters.

• Jocelyn Hamilton is now VP of content for Corus Kids Television, overseeing content for Treehouse, Discovery Kids Canada, Nelvana Studios and YTV. Also at Corus, David Wiebe has been upped to director of content at YTV, while Jamie Piekarz steps into the same post at Treehouse and Discovery Kids Canada.

• CCI Entertainment has sold its spooky reality Ghost Trackers to HBO Family. The U.S. channel plans to roll out the series in January, but gave audiences a sneak peek this month among its Halloween-themed programming.

• Samantha Esteves of Toronto’s ZeroFractal Animation Studio previously worked at Technicolor-Toronto as a commercial post consultant. ZeroFractal, which also has offices in Bogota and Miami, has up until now specialized in architectural visualization, and is now expanding into animation and interactive content for commercials and TV. Incorrect information appeared in the Oct. 15 issue.

Canadian TV producers are back at their desks, detoxing from three nights of Gemini Awards, and sifting through notes from, in some cases, hundreds of meetings they took just days earlier in Cannes at MIPCOM. What all these notes will add up to in terms of providing a snapshot of the international marketplace won’t become clear for months, but here’s an early observation: at a market like MIPCOM, bigger is better.

Toronto’s Kensington Communications is mining the Internet in search of both viewers and user-generated content for its latest project, Diamond Road, and plans to keep a conversation going at diamondroad.tv long after the three-part doc finishes its runs on TVO and Knowledge Network.

Rogers Communications asserts that the primary policy objective of the CRTC should be to lessen Canadian protection and facilitate an accelerated importation of foreign channels.

MONTREAL — International buyers can’t seem to get enough of François en série (Serial Frank) – the made-in-Quebec comedy that’s relatively unknown in la belle province but is making a splash around the world, including NBC, which is eyeing a pilot.

Sullivan Entertainment has revealed its new Anne Shirley and firmed up its plans to make Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning for CTV. The network has picked up the three-hour MOW for 2008, scheduled to wrap shooting in Toronto Oct. 31.

Vancouver’s Brightlight Pictures has teamed with Great Western Entertainment in Australia on the sci-fi series Stormworld. GWE has brought together production, investment and broadcast partners from Canada, Singapore and Down Under to get the kids- and family-aimed live-action off the ground, and will copro 26 half-hours with Brightlight and Singapore’s TheatreRed under the WiKKid.tv brand.