OTTAWA – Bell Canada’s proposed acquisition of Astral Media will not benefit consumers, and will most likely lead to higher prices for television service subscriptions, say four Canadian consumer and public interest groups in comments filed with the CRTC.
The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), who also acts as counsel for Consumers’ Association of Canada (CAC), Canada Without Poverty (CWP), and Council of Senior Citizens’ Organization of British Columbia (COSCO) submitted a joint filing listing several concerns about the deal.
Those issues include the impact of the proposed transaction on the diversity of voices in the Canadian broadcasting system; increasing levels of media concentration in conventional television and pay and specialty television services; increasing costs for ‘basic service’ television programming; and increased vertical integration which could in turn weaken competition in broadcasting services.
“The cost of “basic service” for television has increased while broadcasting distribution undertakings have simultaneously crammed more services into the lowest retail tiers”, reads the filing. “Consumers are also offered less flexibility in packaging and fewer choices to pick and pay only for the services they want to watch. Increasing prices paired with less flexibility and choice suggest that market forces are not working to deliver affordable prices for consumers. The Commission must intervene to deliver on its stated expectations of affordability, increased choice and flexibility.”
PIAC/CAC/CWP/COSCO also questioned Bell's proposed tangible benefits package which it described as “flawed”.
“We take particular issue with the proposal to direct $40M to BCE Inc.'s subsidiary Northwestel in order to modernize broadband infrastructure in the North”, the filing continues. “The proposal fails to meet the Commission's test set out for tangible benefits on all three grounds – it is not incremental to broadcasting, it had already previously been required by the Commission in the price cap review of Northwestel and thus would have been done in absence of the Bell/Astral transaction, and it does not flow to third parties but rather back to a BCE Inc. subsidiary.”
Lastly, the group urged the CRTC to challenge Bell’s argument that “it must get larger in order to compete with foreign unregulated media players, such as OTT providers”, noting that Canadian viewers tend to use OTT services as a complement to regulated broadcasting services, and that Bell’s Internet services and use of data caps on retail subscribers already provide a “significant competitive advantage over OTT services”.
