TORONTO – Rogers-owned OMNI Television has filed an application with the CRTC for a new must-carry, multilingual and multicultural channel to be known as OMNI Regional.
The proposed national channel would be comprised of four feeds: Pacific, Prairies, and East, mirroring OMNI’s local stations in those regions, plus ICI Quebec via a strategic partnership with Montreal ethnic television station International Channel/Canal International (ICI) aimed at French-language ethnic communities in that province.
As part of its proposal, OMNI Television is asking for inclusion in basic TV packages (pursuant to section 9(1)(h) of the Broadcasting Act). Current local OMNI stations in Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver would continue to operate as free over-the-air channels, as would ICI’s local station in Montreal. Its application calls for a wholesale fee of $0.12 per subscriber per month for BDUs in English markets and $0.10 in French markets and that would have to be wedged into the $25/month skinny basic package the Commission just forced the industry to launch.
The broadcaster also pledged to reinstate the four daily newscasts in Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese and Punjabi that it slashed last year, making it the only national ethnic programming service in Canada to provide daily newscasts, seven days a week, in multiple languages.
“We believe our application offers a win-win solution: Canadians get low-cost access to quality news and information programming in their language of comfort no matter where they live, and OMNI and its community and production partners get a stable revenue source that we can use to build a strong and relevant voice for ethnic audiences in Canada,” said Colette Watson, Rogers’ VP broadcast and TV operations, in Tuesday’s news release.
OMNI Television’s proposal, expected to be made public by the CRTC in the near future, also includes:
– A commitment to devote 80% of OMNI Regional’s schedule to ethnic programming – a 20% increase over current levels – and maintaining the requirement to devote 50% of the schedule to third-language programming;
– A commitment to devote a minimum of 40% of OMNI Regional’s annual revenues to the production of Canadian programming;
– A commitment to maintain local daily current affairs shows in Mandarin, Cantonese and Punjabi languages;
– The creation of a national cultural affairs series produced in Alberta designed to showcase important cultural and social contributions from Canada’s ethnocultural communities;
– A commitment to re-establish in-house production in all of the markets served by OMNI’s over-the-air stations; and
– The creation of four regional feeds that comprise the national network will be specifically tailored to ethnic Canadians living in B.C., the Prairies, Eastern Canada and Quebec by including English and French-language ethnic programming as well as third-language programming produced by local independent producers that reside in those regions.
“Our new current affairs programming is resonating with local viewers, but we’ve also heard from our community partners, Parliamentarians and the CRTC about the importance of news and information programming to our democracy”, Watson added. “If approved, our proposal will allow us to produce both current affairs programming that is locally relevant and news programming that is national in scope.”
