By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers says it has been forced to plow millions of dollars to carry Corus channels it no longer sees as useful, and asked for assurances that, if it wins its case at the Federal Court of Appeal, it will be made whole.
The cable giant allegedly asked Corus in December whether it will reimburse Rogers if it wins its case challenging how the CRTC is applying the standstill rule to both parties in a commercial dispute wherein Rogers wants to remove at least one Corus service and move two others down the dial on cable.
Corus allegedly didn’t respond to the inquiry, “meaning it has no intention of making Rogers whole if its position on the standstill rule and the CRTC’s powers are found to be incorrect,” Rogers alleges in new court documents filed last week and that requests an expedited hearing on the matter.
“With every month that passes, Rogers will incur additional millions in unrecoverable costs,” Rogers adds. “An expedited appeal would, at the very least, mitigate this harm.”
Rogers, which was granted leave to appeal earlier this month, is asking for a hearing date on all matters under appeal for this summer.
Corus declined to comment, citing policy about speaking publicly about ongoing legal matters.
The underlying issues, in part, stem from Rogers’s acquisition last summer of the programming rights of Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal, which was followed by the cable giant giving notice that it was terminating its carriage agreement with Corus at the end of last year.
The deal meant Corus lost the rights to certain programming, such as Bravo content on Slice and those related to the HGTV and Food Network brands. Accordingly, Corus has moved to make changes to the services, including rebranding HGTV to “Home” and Food Network to “Flavour,” as well as programming changes to Slice.
The appeal itself stems from two confidential rulings by the CRTC in November that forces Rogers to refrain from removing Corus’s Slice from certain television packages and from moving Corus’s new Home and Flavour networks down the dial. Rogers argues that Slice has lost its luster with the loss of Bravo content – which Corus disputes –and, by replacing Home and Flavour with its own HGTV and Food Network services, says it wants to ensure its customers don’t get confused as to where the American programming is.
Rogers alleges that the CRTC has unevenly applied the standstill rule, which stipulates that the parties must maintain the same terms and conditions as before the dispute until it’s resolved privately or by the CRTC. Rogers argues that the regulator is unfairly forcing it to maintain those terms and conditions by carrying the services in the same place but also allowing Corus to make changes to its own services. Corus argues that it was forced into this situation by Rogers’s own hand when it acquired the rights.
“The CRTC’s unprecedented and unsupportable imposition of a commercial relationship – on terms of the CRTC’s choosing rather than the terms the parties freely negotiated – is causing serious and irreparable prejudice to Rogers,” the cable company said in its expedited hearing request last week.
Corus has argued that the proposed moves by Rogers would harm it financially because it needs viewership from subscribers of Canada’s largest broadcaster.
