Commission asks for public input on multi-ethnic must carry TV channel; hearing coming in October

GATINEAU – The CRTC today invited Canadians “to share their opinions on applications received to operate a multilingual, multi-ethnic channel with mandatory distribution across Canada.”In May of last year, the Commission approved a request by Rogers Media to turn its struggling OMNI local OTA stations into regional, must carry specialty channels, complete with a subscriber fee of $0.12 per subscriber per month.The Commission granted OMNI that status under the provisions of section 9(1)(h) of the Broadcasting Act (Rogers had all but said it would close the multilingual, multi-ethnic OMNI stations without that Commission decision), but only for three years. It...