TORONTO – Limited in our questions as we were (no talking about iPhone, no talking about the advanced wireless spectrum auction), here’s a pretty good taste of what we media types who cover Rogers Communications asked about during Tuesday’s press conference just prior to the RCI AGM (we omitted the questions about the Blue Jays and their dismal start to the season, however).
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About the AWS auction, and the fact they wouldn’t talk about it, said CEO Ted Rogers: “If you’re going to bid on a Rembrandt, you don’t want to talk about it ahead of time.”
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About the just-finished CRTC hearings into BDU and specialty channel policy. Will there be fee for carriage?
Says Rogers: “I say there will be no fee for carriage. I would say that distant signals will be abolished. I would say the Commission will move to get rid of the literally dozens, if not hundreds of antique rules and modernize it for the digital age… The big picture is we’re moving to digital, so what are the rules going to be?
Adds RCI vice-chairman Phil Lind: “Fee for carriage on local signals is probably not going to take place.” As for distant signals though: “I think there will be some movement there,” said Lind, clarifying his boss’s declaration that they will be “abolished.” Lind predicted there will be new distant signal fees for broadcasters to receive and that “will be much higher for the satellite companies because they don’t pay anything right now.”
Later in the press conference, when asked if RCI would have done anything differently or better at the hearing, Rogers said: “Phil would say we could do better by my not going.”
After denying that, Lind said it was a little tougher going first because the questions were quite regimented and discourse was a bit stilted at that point. Commissioners were more open to wide-ranging conversations as the hearings went on. “The upside was we laid out a very comprehensive platform for the future and almost every question for the next three weeks Konrad was measuring against the Rogers plan,” said Lind.
But, what about going directly to the Prime Minister, as Shaw Communications CEO Jim Shaw did?
“Jim has to do what he has to do,” said Rogers, who noted that even as a lifelong Tory, “I have never placed a phone call to (the PM),” since he’s been Prime Minister. “I try to (make change) through process at the Department of Industry and the CRTC and so on. For me anyway, I think that’s a better way.”
Despite Shaw’s letter, an item like fee-for-carriage for conventional broadcast stations will hit the PM’s office anyway, said Lind. “Any time an issue where we’re going to sock cable consumers five or 10 dollars a month for nothing extra, that’s going to be on the government’s radar and not just a matter for the CRTC. This will be a big issue for the government to deal with.”
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After talking about the exploding growth in data revenue for Rogers Wireless, RCI COO Nadir Mohamed was asked (by Cartt.ca) why one of those data features, video, has been so slow to take off.
“You really have to start with customer behaviour,” he said. “I’m not sure conventional TV in a mobile platform is compelling… The story for me on the wireless side is mobile broadband… Everything that you can do wired today on the Internet you will start to do on a wireless phone.”
And once wireless broadband is more ubiquitous, growth in video consumed on handhelds will then grow. And that’s why RCI is investing in its HSPA network, to “drive bandwidth and drive speeds to make that world possible. So, to me, that’s an incredible future,” added Mohamed.
“Behaviorally, where the world is going is interactive, on demand and personalized. That’s the world that’s enabled with our higher bandwidth wireless services.”
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On the ever-growing demands on the Rogers networks thanks to bandwidth hungry applications, Mohamed noted Rogers Cable is going to usage-based billing – effectively, metering – for its high speed Internet customers. That means the big users will pay bigger fees, depending on what they’re downloading. “The demand that the Internet is placing on the capacity of our network is exploding,” he said.
“This will be the first time that this will be done in North America,” added Rogers.
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And if we can’t talk about the iPhone, why has it taken so long for Rogers, the only Canadian GSM operator, to launch the GSM-only iPhone? “We’re a little slow in negotiating I guess,” said Rogers,
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And finally, Rogers noted the company is beginning to feel inklings of an economic downturn in Ontario, shown through increased activity in collections activity towards overdue customers.
“We’re just sensing it now. We haven’t quantified it yet,” said Rogers. “There’s a real risk in Ontario of one of the three auto plants closing and the province is in serious potential danger, but I hope I’m wrong.
“So far it’s not hitting on sales or revenue,” added Rogers. “We expect to have a downturn because we’re a conservative type of company in finance and management.”
– Greg O’Brien
