OTTAWA – In his speech to the Canadian Association of Broadcasters convention today at lunch, CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein said he has heard the complaints from the industry (after first making some complaints of his own, see related story) and made a few significant changes to the 2008 calendar.
First, the policy review hearings on broadcast distribution undertakings (cable, satellite, telco TV and others) and specialty services has been pushed back to April 7. They had been scheduled to begin February 4th (after having previously been set for January).
Also new is the broadcasters’ demands that fee for carriage – or having consumers pay a wholesale fee for over-the-air broadcast channels carried by their distributor – be included in the BDU policy review, will now also be considered. The Commission’s initial thinking was that it had been dealt with just last year in the conventional broadcaster policy review hearings and there was no need to revisit the issue so soon.
However, the broadcasters (as we noted here) insisted that fee-for-carriage has to be an important part of their future.
Submissions on that issue are now due January 25th.
The Commission has also ceded to the cacophony of complaints that a public hearing was necessary to deal with the myriad issues confronting the Canadian Television Fund. This part of the story was initially broken by Cartt.ca in September when von Finckenstein mentioned during the Commission’s “Diversity of Voices” hearing that a public review of the CTF was in the works.
Readers will recall this has been a hot button issue throughout 2007 as BDUs Shaw Communications and Videotron ltée pulled their contributions for a while saying the fund had to be looked at and perhaps abolished. (Search “CTF” on Cartt.ca to see what we mean.)
The Commission has spent the year analyzing and studying the issues and was preparing to make recommendations on the fund’s future without a hearing, based largely on a report it published back in June. However, most stakeholders feel a public airing of all the issues is necessary and that new hearing will take the February 4 slot left open with the delay in the BDU and specialty process.
Von Finckenstein told CAB delegates today that it has all the submissions it needs on the fund and no new ones will be required in advance of the hearing, although anyone wanting to appear has until December 14th to say so.
Finally, the license renewal hearings for CTV and CanWest Global, which were to begin in April have been pushed to late 2008 or perhaps early in 2009. Their licenses will be extended in the meantime.
These looming license renewals were one of the other reasons broadcasters were complaining about the BDU and specialty hearings because they felt they wouldn’t be able to properly reflect any potential policy change impact as any new BDU and specialty policies wouldn’t have been available in enough time.
– Greg O’Brien
