MONTREAL – Telus is another in the line of companies who want the purchase of Astral Media by Bell Canada killed.
But, if it is approved, the industry needs better rules to govern the behaviour of it and other vertically integrated companies (but especially Bell…), Telus told the CRTC Thursday morning in Montreal.
The best example of Bell’s intransigence, said Telus executives, is its dealings on multiplatform content. “It has been mentioned by many parties in this proceeding that Olympic coverage on mobile was only available to Bell Mobility subscribers,” said Telus director of broadcast regulation and corporate affairs, Ann Mainville-Neeson. “In fact, no Bell Media video content is widely available on other national mobile providers as a result of the commercially unreasonable terms demanded by Bell for access to this content. To be clear, Bell’s offer for mobile content was far more expensive than the three million dollars per annum suggested by Mr. Cope on the first day of this hearing."
Telus told a similar story as Rogers did Wednesday: Offers were made by Bell Media for its content on mobile platforms over a year ago, and at much higher prices ($8 million, according to Telus) than Cope said on Monday. The $3 million offer was a verbal one made just last month, Telus reps told the Commission, “and only on condition of settling our final offer arbitration and agreeing on a minimum penetration on TSN at 75%,” said Telus chief marketing officer David Fuller.
“Similarly, other statements made by (Bell Media president Kevin) Crull on the first day of the hearing do not reflect reality. Mr. Crull went so far as to say that Bell had never ‘provided any behaviour in the marketplace that was inconsistent with both the spirit of vertical integration and the letter of it’. And yet as Mr. Crull is well aware, Bell denied access to signals to competitors who would not sign its carriage renewal agreement,” said Mainville-Neeson.
As Cartt.ca readers will remember, Bell and Telus went through a long regulatory fight (which Fuller referenced above), culminating in this July’s final offer arbitration decision which let Telus retain its packaging plans. In the meantime though, as the fight wound through the regulatory process, Telus was without new French sports service RDS2 (a problem in Telus’ OptikTV French markets), Discovery HD, Space HD, BNN HD, Animal Planet HD and Bravo HD.
Bell, of course, has its own version of the story, which we’re sure we will hear Friday afternoon when it gets to reply to the intervenors.
After the Telus reps made their case Thursday, we asked them if they could quantify the damage done in terms of estimates of revenue or subscriber losses or slowdowns by not being able to carry those Bell Media channels as the FOA process dragged on.
That’s a bit difficult to get a proper count of, said Fuller. “We actually never did that analysis,” he said. “But where it hurt is that for the better part of 12 months we were differentially at a disadvantage relative to the offerings our customers could get on Shaw…. Did some (customers) not come to us because they are huge Discovery fans and knew we didn’t have the HD version? Possibly, but I don’t know what that number is.”
Without RDS2 in Quebec, “that definitely hurt us, but it’s impossible to tell how many people didn’t come to us because of that. We’re taking market share right now… but how many chose not to come to us because we didn’t have RDS2 for that period of time and meanwhile Videotron did or Bell did?” said Fuller.
Given the problems it and others have faced in dealing with Bell of late, the still-new CRTC vertical integration code of conduct which the FOA struggle encompassed, has to be toughened, says Telus. If the Astral deal is to be approved, Bell must face new conditions of license on all its programming services and its satellite relay distribution service that specify conduct that would automatically constitute an abuse of market power including (and this is right from the Telus brief):
* failure to provide interim access to content during the dispute;
* refusal to contract for all content rights, including the linear broadcast rights and the non-linear on-demand rights, each on a multi-platform basis, for one unified commercially reasonable price when authenticated by a subscriber’s television subscription;
* insistence on terms which prevent a competitive distributor from providing a differentiated offer to consumers; and
* failure to provide sufficient notice of the launch of new content or to give sufficient priority to negotiating an agreement regarding access to any new content which forces the complainant to launch the content without an agreement in place.
Bell executives likely spent much of their time this week watching (at CPAC.ca) or listening (on the CRTC site) to the online feed of this proceeding while lividly shouting invective at what was being said about them. We feel pretty safe guessing at that scenario.
We look forward to their rebuttal Friday.
