WHILE THE SATELLITE SIGNAL theft issue seems to have receded into the background recently, the Canadian TV industry must keep the pressure on government in order to force change.
A number of things have happened of late to limit the damage caused by illegal U.S. dishes, such as DirecTV’s as-yet-unhacked new access card – and the fact that Bell ExpressVu is nearly done with its card-swap, moving to a far more secure algorithm. The quick Quebec Superior Court decision in April to strike down a lower court ruling which said the Radiocommunication Act was contrary to our Charter of Rights was also a big help.
Despite those moves – and the abject screwiness on Parliament Hill (it now looks like there may not be a spring election after all thanks to the ridiculous defection of a certain former Conservative leadership candidate directly into the Liberal cabinet), the television industry in Canada must keep up the pressure on the federal government and focus on the amendments to the Radiocommunication Act which have started, stopped, started, stopped and started again, undulating with the whims of the party in power.
Simply put. Some people will do anything to get TV without paying and we should have the right laws to stop it.
I know three people who steal TV (and what really ticks me off is that two of them are cops!). Until recently, they stole ExpressVu’s signal. But, as they’ve watched more and more channels disappear from their screens lately as the Bell-owned DTH company finally secures its signal, this trio has now purchased new U.S. Dish Network gear to hack TV. (It’s their third dish and decoder system in 18 months since they all once ripped-off DirecTV, too.)
Their logic? “TV is crap so we should get it for free.”
It’s very difficult, not to mention annoying, to argue with this kind of warped logic. If TV is crap, I asked, why do you watch sooo much of it? If it’s crap, why do you watch it at all? If it’s crap why spend over $1,000 in multiple dish systems in order to “get it free”? They don’t even bother with the distinction between U.S. and Canadian channels – they don’t especially want ESPN or HBO – all they want is a way around the system.
Logic doesn’t work well with this type of consumer. I ask, “would you do your own jobs, as cops, for free?” “Of course not,” they answer. “Then why do you expect television producers and deliverers to do theirs for free?”
“It’s not the same,” is the answer. Ugh.
That said, the industry has to shoulder some of blame – at least a little of it, anyway, for how consumers feel. Some TV is crap. And too much of that type of television can end up painting the whole industry the same color.
As well, from a consumer standpoint, the regulations governing much of the channel lineups are often inexplicable/impenetrable. Despite the fact that a lot of the argument about what can or can’t be carried in Canada centres around geographic copyrights, the regs should be loosened to let more channels in and give viewers more choice.
Finally, the numbers of thieves still presented as a fact is another problem. When the Coalition Against Satellite Signal Theft (www.casst-ccvss.ca) first put out its numbers, I bought it. About 700,000 people were said to be getting their television illegally, costing the industry $400 million a year. The Canadian Cable Television Association commissioned a study, extrapolated and we had some eye-catching numbers to stick to the fight.
While there’s no doubt that signal theft is a burden on the Canadian TV industry, chopping millions in revenue from the system and from the monies diverted towards producing Canadian content, I have a hard time now believing the guesstimates the industry collectively came up with back in 2002.
Assume for a moment that many of those who were using a DirecTV dish with a hacked card were also still taking basic cable (even those pilfering the system want to see the local news and weather) so when DirecTV’s stream was secured in April 2004, many would have then switched to digital cable or went to a Canadian satellite, rather than get burned again trying the other U.S. dish. (Also assume that most using a U.S. dish were getting DirecTV, because it was far and away the most popular sell in 2002-’03.)
While it’s very difficult to guess what these people might do or where they would turn to for their TV (Would they pay for digital cable? Would they hack Dish Network or ExpressVu? Would they turn off TV altogether?), it’s hard to come up with anything approaching 700,000 users.
Looking at the digital subscriber additions from the quarterly reports of the top five video distributors in Canada: Rogers Cable, Shaw Communications (Star Choice and Shaw Cable), Videotron, Cogeco Cable and Bell ExpressVu; they have collectively added roughly 500,000 digital customers since the time that DirecTV shut off their old, eminently hack-able, data stream. (It’s hard to be completely accurate in terms of timing since some of the companies have August 31st year-ends and others have December 31st. Plus, some count digital terminals, while others count households. There are other variances, too.)
We can’t assume everyone switched from one hacked DBS system to another. We also can’t assume that everyone went from DirecTV to something legit. And, the industry always said that at most, 10% were actually paying for a U.S. dish, which would mean they got the new cards in the mail.
Plus, one has to assume that many of those 500,000 new additions were simply legit customers opting for a digital upgrade. Basic cable additions were, for all intents and purposes, pretty flat over that time span.
Any way the numbers are sliced, that 700,000 customer figure (which leads to the $400 million in annual losses the industry still goes on about) just can’t be right. And this over-estimate, I think, hurts the industry’s case in the credibility department among smart consumers and smart government officials.
But, like I said, theft is wrong. It’s costly. It costs jobs and devalues the entire Canadian TV system, which despite its flaws is still a damn good system. Our laws should be better. Our regs, a little more flexible. When cabinet finally gets back to some semblance of government work, the industry must keep the pressure on to change.
– Greg O’Brien
