GATINEAU – The way the dance works in these CRTC proceedings is the applicant draws a few lines in the sand in its application and presentation, a few in granite, listens to a few days of appearances by intervenors, gauges the reaction of the commissioners to various ideas presented – and then re-draws those sandy lines for their final public follow up appearances.
BCE was no different Friday morning during its appearance on the closing day of the CRTC hearing into its acquisition of CTV.
Right off the bat, its executives told the CRTC it is ready to endorse the Commission’s tangible benefits value of $236.4 million, or $15 million more than the figure BCE came to the table with on Tuesday. (It’s worth noting that buying CTV twice – the first time was in 2000 – will now have produced benefits from BCE of close to half a billion dollars.)
BCE executives pulled hard for a reduced number of $223.1 million, applying a 5% benefits rate on the challenged conventional TV assets, but the Commission appeared unmoved. “Five percent doesn’t fly,” said chairman Konrad von Finckenstein after BCE’s final presentation.
Having heard the various complaints from the creative community that not enough of the funds were headed to the TV screen in terms of programming, Friday’s presentation saw a few things cut by BCE and millions more diverted to the screen.
“(W)e are prepared to eliminate "Enhanced Local News Production in HD” and to reduce the MPEG-4 proposal to $60 million from $84 million. Coupled with the change in the total amount of our benefits package, a total of $50.6 million in benefits is freed up, which we will redirect to programs of national interest ($26.8 million), to local news ($13.8 million) and to the A Channels ($10 million), which require significant support so they can continue to be valuable contributors to local expression in the communities they serve,” said CTV COO Kevin Crull.
The MPEG-4 proposal would see the money directed towards upgrading Bell’s satellite TV system to the new compression standard so that all local Canadian broadcasters would be carried (but not all in HD). There has been varying reaction to this and BCE says if approved, it will begin the rollout as soon as possible and will be complete in 12-18 months.
BCE also committed to keep the A Channels open and operating for at least another three years, while taking the $10 million it was going to spend on hardware at the stations and switching it to programming – and to commit to keeping the new shows in six Western markets (morning shows and the like in Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver) on air for at least four years.
As for exclusive content, the commissioners didn’t seem to want to talk about it, leaving Crull with the last word on that topic: “(W)e would ask the Commission to resist the efforts of Telus, Cogeco and Quebecor to turn the current proceeding into Vertical Integration – Part I,” he said. “The vertical integration hearing (set for June) will take place shortly and, as the Chairman mentioned, a decision will be issued expeditiously.”
The last bit discussed Friday morning will surely give those concerned with closed captioning and other accessibility issues some serious optimism. A number of intervenors re-emphasized that TV programming has problems with closed captioning and described video and various other accessibility issues, all of which need funding in order to make real progress.
The chair and BCE executives got into a discussion over $5.7 million which is still left unspent from the 2000 benefits package when the company first bought CTV. Von Finckenstein asked if that money could not be turned into some kind of fund for an accessibility package.
“That would help solve a major problem of society,” he noted. BCE executives said they would file their thoughts on that by Monday.
Final written submissions are due February 11.
