The CRTC will decide how much it will cost Bell and Quebecor to broadcast each other’s sports channels, it said this month.
The two companies agreed that they could not hash out commercial terms to distribute Bell’s RDS and Videotron’s TVA Sports and filed in November a request for the regulator to make that decision.
The commission agreed in a letter dated May 15, saying the request met all the required criteria for a final offer arbitration hearing: the dispute is shared between the two; it concerns only monetary issues; the parties exhausted all methods to come to an agreement; the issue is relevant to the regulation and supervision of the Canadian broadcasting system; and the resolution of the dispute doesn’t require a change in or a new policy.
The companies have until June 3 to file their respective offers for distribution. They will then have until June 25 to respond to each other’s offer.
The CRTC is asking the parties to submit other documentation, including the affiliation agreement between them on the current distribution of the sports channels; the wholesale rates paid for that distribution; the retail rate of the packages; and the average monthly number of subscribers to the channels and average watch time.
