OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The CRTC today told the country’s specialty and pay channel owners that the financial and subscriber data historically made public must stay that way.
The CRTC had withheld releasing statistics (such as subscriber numbers, revenue earned and so forth) from the 2004 and 2005 broadcast years until it ruled on a Canadian Association of Broadcasters request that such information remain confidential.
The request was part of the Commission’s 2004 look at whether or not negotiations between broadcast distribution undertakings (cable and satellite companies) and broadcasters were fair.
Since such figures filed by Canada’s BDUs are kept confidential by the CRTC, thanks to the competitive nature of the distribution market, the broadcasters sought the same confidentiality on the same grounds.
The Commission, however, disagreed, saying that Canadian specialty services still benefited from genre protection and did not face direct competition the same way cable and satellite companies do. "(A)lthough the number of licensed specialty services is increasing, and although each, through their programming, must compete with other specialty services for both viewers and advertising dollars, many continue to enjoy regulatory protection from direct competition with respect to genre, guaranteed access to BDU carriage, access to the Commission’s dispute resolution process and, in many cases, access to Commission-set wholesale rates when distributed as part of the basic service," reads Thursday’s decision.
