GATINEAU – With a light dusting of snow outside and a grey beginning to yet another week of talking about paying for conventional television signals, you’ll hopefully forgive us for feeling just a little like this.
This is the fourth hearing inside of two years (and the second one in the past month!) whose focus is on compensating local TV broadcasters for their signals). This one, as CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein pointed out right at the start, will not set policy, but instead will inform a report to be filed in the new year with Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, who ordered it.
What the minister will do with that report is anyone’s guess, but von Finckenstein told attendees this morning that the evidence presented in this hearing will not impact the one just wrapped up 11 days ago. A policy decision stemming from BNC 2009-411, whose public hearing ended November 27th “will be made on the basis of the evidence presented,” during that hearing, said the chair.
(However, final submissions on 2009-411 aren’t due until December 14th and one would be naive to think that those last few pages still to be filed won’t reflect in some way what is asked and answered this week in the Outaouais Room at Phase IV in Gatineau.
This process is far different than the others however. Thanks to duelling ad machines (localtvmatters.ca and stopthetvtax.ca primarily), grassroots e-mail campaigns and other public thrusts, the CRTC had to catalogue over 190,000 submissions from Canadians on this issue.
And we’re not done. As of our count on Monday afternoon, there have been an additional 7,300 comments from interested consumers posted on the Commission’s new web site since its launch last Monday. http://television.askingcanadians.com.
Clearly, Canadians have A LOT to say about their TV system.
And rightly, the CRTC let a few grassroots groups and individual Canadians have their say on Monday, along with some unions and one big media company, Montreal’s Quebecor (owner of leading broadcaster TVA and dominant carrier Videotron).
• Quebecor’s Pierre Karl Péladeau re-made the company’s points about how to rebalance the system which it aired in November: It wants to take the money paid to specialty channels and “redistribute” it to the over-the-air sector, thereby costing consumers no extra on their cable and satellite bills. How to get specialty channel owners (especially ones with no conventional TV assets like QMI has) to agree to this, because they won’t, is still an unanswered question.
• CACTUS, which is a less-prickly group than it sounds, advocated for a community-based media approach to become the core of what the CRTC protects. The Canadian Association for Community Television Users and Stations wants to see line-by-line accounting of just how the primary community channel owner/operators, the cable companies, spend the money they have to spend on local programming. “CACTUS made two access-to-information requests to the CRTC last month for a breakdown of community channel spending, volumes of programming and access by company and community back to 1990,” said CACTUS president Catherine Edwards. Finding out the Commission doesn’t gather that data or require cablecos to keep anything beyond logs for a year, “we were staggered,” she added, since $100 million of cable subscribers money goes towards the community channels every year.
• Since conventional broadcasters say they don’t want to run OTA transmitters in rural areas any more, CACTUS wants the CRTC to give those rights and gear to them – and their members will run the transmitters, re-broadcasting the programming of private and public broadcasters as those towers always have – but also using them to distribute community programming, too. “CACTUS will be proposing at the upcoming community TV hearing that community run, multi-platform access production centres be licensed and funded so that communities can one-stop-shop to get their messages out,” added Edwards.
• Now, while the rest of the news media chased Péladeau out the door to hear him re-say what he just said to the Commission… again, we stuck around to hear from Carolynn Parsons, a 60-something Canadian from Port Alberni, B.C. who delivered a passionate, thoughtful presentation from the CRTC’s Vancouver office via video uplink. She noted she lives on just over $900 a month and pays more than 10% of that income to Shaw Cable for TV and Internet (she didn’t name her company, but Shaw’s the only one in Port Alberni).
To put it simply, thanks to recent rate increases she’s already endured – and the threat of more cost coming in the form of a fee to be paid to local broadcasters, she’s on the verge of cutting off, or at least cutting back, her TV consumption. “I must soon cancel my TV portion in favour of what’s more important to me, the Internet,” said Parsons, who added she uses Skype to avoid long distance phone charges, too.
“In many respects, you could be considered the canary in the coal mine,” said commissioner Marc Patrone when he questioned her.
She pleaded for more Canadian content and more local content, as did another presenter from Red Deer later on Monday, Gord Bontje, who added “I really don’t need another nine ways to watch CSI.”
• The other central theme to day one? A-la-carte. People want to buy their channels one at a time. Videotron comes closest to it, offering the chance for people to pick their own groups of 15, 20 or 30 channels (out of a possible 118). But the old basic and analog cable channels are not in that group. (Shaw also offers a limited pick and pay with 59 digital channels and ethnic services. Rogers and Cogeco likely offer some a-la-carte, but we couldn’t find just where on their web sites. Satellite technology doesn’t lend itself well to selling one channel at a time to customers.)
Not good enough, said some (and more will be sure to say it again. And if you doubt that, check the threads among the 7,300 new comments to the Commission). “Consumers should not be forced to choose packages put together by the BDUs,” said Anthony Hémond of Union des consommateurs, a Quebec consumer rights group.
Tuesday will likely be the busiest of the week-long hearing with Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, Corus, Astral, CTV, Canwest and CBC set to go, sprinkled in with a number of consumers, some representing the Stop The TV Tax side and others on the Local TV Matters side. Check out the audio on www.crtc.gc.ca, the video on www.cpac.ca or follow me on twitter (@gregobr) for a little play-by-play, 140 characters at a time. We’ll be there all day tomorrow.
