WHEN IT COMES TO reading the CRTC, or predicting, or crystal-balling, everyone resorts to their own brand of “reading the tea leaves.”
So take what we have to say next with a grain of salt (hmm, that’s three clichés in less than 50 words, so we’d better get to it!).
Yesterday’s Canadian Television Fund recommendations from the CRTC came with a dissent written by commissioner Michel Morin. As we report here, he was defending Quebecor Media Inc.’s proposal for a new fund aimed solely at producing more French dramatic television and multiplatform content.
In defense of QMI’s TVA and the overall French market in Canada, Morin wrote: “In contrast to companies such as CTV and Canwest, for whom the drop in profitability in recent years is mainly attributable to the rising cost of the American series on which their business model is based, the decrease in profitability of TVA Group is attributable to the small size of the French-language market as well as the splitting of the audience and advertising market with specialty networks.”
There are two issues addressed by this particular sentence that may – or may not – reflect how others within the Commission are thinking about new policies for broadcast distribution undertakings, for which the public process has just completed.
Now, the Quebec, or French-language TV market in Canada is a sore topic for those who live and breathe that part of the industry. Those in Quebec want different (distinct?!) rules for that much smaller, but just as fragmented, video market and Morin’s quote addresses that possibility (as does his whole dissent, really. Click here and scroll down to Appendix 2).
But the quote also seems to buy what the cable and satellite and telco TV distributors were saying about fee for carriage: That the reason margins are suffering at CTV and Canwest Global isn’t because local news is hard to do or that HD is expensive, but that the cost of buying U.S. shows has gone through the roof because the two big Canadian broadcasters are bidding themselves ever higher when they go to L.A. to buy.
Commissioner Morin went further in his dissent, commending QMI for proposing this new fund and spending on Canadian content and “did not ask for a subsidy or simultaneous substitution in order to carry out its plans. That is a radical departure from the requests of other over-the-air broadcasters in Canada!” he writes.
So if he believes that, as well as that “the drop in profitability (at CTV and Canwest) in recent years is mainly attributable to the rising cost of the American series on which their business model is based,” one wonders how many within the CRTC think along the same lines and then that the Commission won’t actually be riding to the English broadcasters’ rescue with a new fee-for-carriage paid through distributors, as has been demanded?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. But we’re sure there will be other leafy tea cups to stare into through the summer.
