Media company said its application serves to show urgency of situation
By Ahmad Hathout
Blue Ant Media has filed a Part 1 application requesting that the CRTC reduce its required spending on programs of national interest, citing a stranglehold on its ability to spend money on content that its audiences want to watch.
In the two-page filing, dated June 20 but posted to the CRTC website Thursday, the media company asks that it be allowed to put five, instead of 13.5, per cent of its previous year’s revenues into PNI, which it said “force broadcasters to spend their production budgets on certain genres of programming in a manner that is not aligned with their business strategy or with audience demand,” pointing to the fact that foreign streaming competitors don’t have such restrictions.
“Due to our PNI requirements we are simply unable to create the right mix of content,” it said. “This impacts not only our Canadian broadcast revenue which is directly tied to our ratings, but also our ability to monetize the content we commission with global audiences through our global channels and distribution sales.”
The company said its request isn’t novel, adding it is aware that the commission has suspended similar applications so that it could first deal with the implementation of the Online Streaming Act, which is expected to provide relief by forcing foreign streamers to contribute their fair share into CanCon spending.
This application, it said, is to “stress the urgency and necessity to address our inability to compete in the marketplace given our current PNI expenditure requirements without further delay. Changes must be made before we suffer material financial hardship and our viability is at real risk. We simply cannot wait any longer.”
Blue Ant said it has “one of the highest PNI expenditure requirements among Canadian broadcasters,” at that 13.5 per cent.
In addition, it said “as the television services in the Blue Ant group do not typically air drama, kids or variety programming to meet its PNI licence conditions, Blue Ant must create a disproportionate amount of document programming – severely restricting Blue Ant’s ability to meet audience demand with other types of programming, such as lifestyle and reality.”
Blue Ant said it would continue to abide by its existing conditions of licence.
In May, the CRTC reduced Corus’s PNI to five per cent on an extraordinary basis, citing its desperate financial situation. That situation was highlighted earlier this week when the company announced it is about to go through more layoffs by summer end.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly said Blue Ant is asking for a reduction of its PNI spend from 8.5 per cent to five per cent. Its mandated PNI spend, as already noted elsewhere in the story, is 13.5 per cent.
