OTTAWA – The National Football League wants to come to Canada. Specifically, it has asked to appear in Court as part of Bell Media’s appeal of a CRTC decision banning simultaneous substitution during the Super Bowl.
In documents filed with the Federal Court of Appeal last week, the NFL officially asked for intervener status in Bell’s appeal of BRP 2015-25 which, among other decisions, ruled that simsub may no longer be performed by Canadian broadcasters for the Super Bowl effective at the end of the 2016 NFL season.
Bell Media, the Canadian rightsholder of the big game that airs nationally on its CTV network and French-language sports channel RDS, could lose up to $20 million in revenue for each of the four Super Bowls it won’t be able to simsub after next year (Bell’s contract with the league ends after the 2019 season, sources have told Cartt.ca).
In the court documents, the NFL said that eliminating simsub means that it “will be unable to fully exploit the value of its Super Bowl and other copyrights in Canada, and will be disadvantaged in future negotiations with Canadian licensees”. In addition, the League says that the decision is unreasonable, arbitrary, and that the CRTC overstepped its jurisdiction.
“The Broadcasting Act does not permit the CRTC to differentiate between individual programs in relation to the application of the simultaneous substitution regime in its Broadcasting Distribution Regulations. By singling out the Super Bowl, the CRTC exceeded its jurisdiction under the Broadcasting Act and transformed a general regulation-making power in to an ad-hoc discretionary one", reads the NFL's motion.
The NFL added that Super Bowl XLIX (played on February 1, 2015) had approximately 114.4 million viewers in the United States and 9.2 million in Canada, making it the most watched television program in both countries so far this year.
– Lesley Hunter
