OTTAWA – Rogers Cable has asked the CRTC for permission to offer satellite radio services Sirius Canada and XM Canada to its digital cable customers.
Rogers requires a license amendment to add the new audio products to its channel lineups in all of its systems in Canada.
"The licensee proposes to amend its licences to authorize these cable systems to distribute one or both of the audio programming services offered by Canada’s two satellite subscription radio undertakings," says the Rogers application.
"Rogers also considered that the addition of one or both of these services to its digital offering would act as an important catalyst to encourage its customers to migrate from an analog to a digital distribution environment," added the application.
The addition of Sirius or XM or both, "would provide significant benefits to Canadian consumers and the Canadian broadcasting system," says the application. "It would also allow our Systems to effectively respond to the competitive offerings of unregulated sources of audio programming, as well as those of licensed Canadian DTH distributors."
"We’re certainly not opposed to that type of thing," Sirius Canada’s vice-president of operations and business development, John Lewis, told cartt.ca this afternoon in response to the Rogers filing. "We think of ourselves as a content company and it’s logical to look at this as a bigger picture."
In the U.S. DirecTV offers XM to its customers while Dish Network viewers can get access to Sirius.
Lewis said research done in the U.S. shows that making the subscription radio services available to video distributors does not cannibalize the original service.
Lewis added that the company has had preliminary discussions with Rogers about putting Sirius Canada’s signals on Rogers Cable but that it wasn’t the only BDU (broadcast distribution undertaking) to have approached him. He declined to name the others.
While its difficult from the Dishnet and DirecTV web sites to discern the retail price for XM or Sirius on their respective DBS carriers, it appears that the two aren’t priced out separately and are included with many packages, such as DirecTV’s US$44.99 a month Total Choice package.
Rogers already offers 40 digital audio services from Galaxie and MaxTrax, as well as any number of local radio stations – although a recent CRTC decision says cable operators don’t have to carry much local radio any more if they don’t want to. Canadian cable operators had requested the condition of license requiring them to distribute local radio stations be eliminated.
There’s a little bit of irony in that, right?
Comments are due into the Commission on this by June 12th.
– Greg O’Brien
