OTTAWA – The CRTC has turned down a request from Rogers Media seeking to decrease local programming on the Quebec feed of its multilingual multi-ethnic discretionary service OMNI Regional.
OMNI Regional offers its service in four separate regional feeds. Rogers asked the Commission to change the condition of licence from requiring the Quebec feed of the service to include 14 hours of original, local independently produced programming each week to be 14 hours of original, local ethnic programming each month.
Rogers said that the proposal to provide 14 hours weekly of original, local independently produced programming on the Quebec feed was an inadvertent error in its original OMNI Regional application and that it was not discovered until after the Commission's decision was issued. It argued that the proposed amendment would represent “only a modest change to the OMNI Regional licence” and that there would be no change to the level of independent production currently offered by the Quebec feed. Rogers also estimated the incremental annual cost of producing additional original local programming on a weekly basis at $1.7 million, which it argued would be "prohibitive".
The CRTC denied that request Monday, noting that it had approved Rogers’ application for a new national service and for the service’s mandatory distribution based on the commitment that the Quebec feed would provide 14 hours of original, local independently produced programming each week.
“The change requested by Rogers would be comparable to an average of only 3.2 hours of original, local programming each week”, reads the decision. “The Commission considers this amount to be inadequate for a service with mandatory distribution.”
The Commission also poked holes in Rogers’ assertion of the programming’s cost, saying that it is “of the view that maintaining the requirement of 14 hours per week of original, local independently produced programming would not have a significant impact on the financial position of OMNI Regional".
