GATINEAU – The upcoming hearings to license four new pay TV applicants isn’t just a fight between the incumbents and the possible newcomers, says CanWest Global.
The interventions and replies surrounding the four applications were made public by the CRTC Monday and of course the incumbent pay operators, Astral Media (The Movie Network, Super Ecran) and Corus Entertainment (Movie Central) are solidly against licensing any of the new applicants.
The hearing is scheduled for October 24th.
As many already know from the re-tellings, last year, Spotlight TV, a company led by former Alliance Atlantis executive George Burger (backed by Insight Media and now Bell ExpressVu) applied for a new pay TV license. The Commission issued an open call for more applications in January of this year and received three more. One from Allarco (backed by the Allard family, the former owners of WIC Broadcasting), another from a division of Quebecor Media, and a unique application for an all-Canadian pay TV channel by two senior executives who run Channel Zero – the owners of Movieola and Silver Screen Classics.
The Canadian Film Channel’s revenue plan was dismissed last week in an investors report (which contained an error) and both Corus and Astral hit it hard in a co-response to it.
Comments on the applications range from wildly supportive to overly negative to the somewhat surprising. For example, ACTRA, the Canadian actors’ union, said in a submission that it thought “people simply would not watch.” the all-Canuck Canadian Film Channel.
While the Canadian Association of Broadcasters took no position on the merits of the application, one of its members, CanWest Global, was pretty straightforward: “Global opposes the licensing of any new English-language pay television service,” reads its submission.
It said, “the consumer would logically face significantly higher retail costs to receive roughly the same programming across two… or more services than he/she can already typically receive from one pay television service and a host of conventional stations and specialty networks. Alternatively, the consumer could choose one pay television service and receive less programming with more repetition for the same price.
“To this end, we note that the consumer’s wallet is not endlessly elastic. In our view, it is likely that consumers will cut back on television services they currently receive in order to absorb another pay television service,” reads the submission from Global’s director of regulatory affairs Jon Medline.
That – along with a few other reasons – means that this licensing hearing is not just about competition in pay TV. The impact of additional pay licensees would also impact other broadcasters because it would mess up the order of exhibition windows for movies and other TV shows and therefore drive down revenue – and the amount of money Global can provide for Canadian production.
“We simply want to remind the Commission that if conventional stations start losing first-run shows like The Shield (which Global buys from Sony Pictures) to a suddenly aggressive and competitive pay television sub-sector, the foundation of our conventional business will necessarily change. Our earliest opportunity to air a show like The Shield on conventional television would be at minimum 18 months – and it would have already ‘gone through the pay wringer’ countless times in the interim lessening its commercial impact,” says the Global submission.
“In short, the issue at hand is not just ‘pay versus pay’ – due to the system of exhibition windows already in place, we are also dealing with ‘pay versus conventional television’ and ‘pay versus specialty’; that is, pay programming costs will increase and conventional and specialty services will get pushed back at least one exhibition window and conventional and specialty programming costs will necessarily rise to maintain the current exhibition window.”
Weather Network/Meteomedia owners Pelmorex also placed a submission on the record to try to ensure the Commission, since it is considering competitive pay TV channels where all of the applicants have asked for must-carry status, won’t alter its current one service per genre policy.
“We have significant concerns that a decision to abandon the ‘one service per genre’ policy will have a detrimental impact on The Weather Network and MétéoMédia and on the Canadian broadcasting system as a whole, and would undermine the Commission’s mandate to fulfill the objectives of broadcasting
policy set out in the Broadcasting Act,” says the Pelmorex submission.
The cable industry, as reported by www.cartt.ca, didn’t oppose the applications’ merits, just their requests to be must-carries.
