OTTAWA – The CRTC has turned down CBC’s request to amend the broadcast licence of its specialty channel bold, instead giving it a month to come up with another programming strategy.
As Cartt.ca has reported, CBC re-launched its Country Canada category 1 specialty channel as bold on March 27 2008, after telling the CRTC that the change could be done without amending its original nature of service. But the Commission disagreed, and scheduled a hearing to determine whether the way that CBC re-branded the channel had negatively impacted “the integrity of the licensing process”. The CRTC eventually suspended the hearing after the CBC agreed to make a formal application to amend bold’s nature of service condition of licence.
In its decision on Wednesday, the Commission acknowledged CBC’s challenges of the limited availability of programming designed to fit its original format, and inadequate financial resources to produce original content.
But it then gave CBC 30 days from the date of the decision to “reposition bold’s programming strategy to address these challenges” while still maintaining “that the majority of the programming is reflective of the living realities of rural Canadians, the nature of service is sufficiently specific and representative of the programming strategy and the service is non-competitive with any existing specialty services”.
Stay tuned, as they say, to see what the CBC reports back with.
