OTTAWA – Depending on how you look at it, the CRTC sided with both Torstar and Rogers Communications over the carriage dispute of Torstar shopping channel ShopTV. Or neither.
After a public hearing on the matter last month, the Commission offered concessions to both parties in a decision Wednesday. It supported Torstar’s claim that Rogers is offside on the Commission’s 1:1 regulation which says for each BDU-owned channel carried, there must be a similar unaffiliated channel also offered.
“…the Commission determines that where Rogers is counting the House of Commons programming service as a third-party exempt service in order to meet its regulatory obligations under section 21(3) of the Regulations, it is not in compliance”, the decision reads.
However, noting that the requirement could result in Rogers electing to drop another programming undertaking, the CRTC offered Rogers an exception to distribute an additional third-party exempt programming undertaking as part of its digital basic service, instead of as part of its analog basic service on its Class 1 systems, should there be insufficient analog capacity. Rogers has 30 days from the date of this decision to remedy its non-compliance.
Torstar also objected to the rate per subscriber per month that Rogers is asking it to pay for continued access to the systems it is already carried on. Despite submitting three rate benchmarks it considered appropriate, the Commission called Torstar’s evidence “inconclusive”, and determined that Torstar “has failed to demonstrate that the rate currently being charged by Rogers is no longer appropriate”.
