OTTAWA – Shaw has been given the official go ahead by the CRTC to extend its local television satellite solution (LTSS) to Canadian viewers impacted by the digital television transition.
As part of its purchase of Canwest Global, Shaw earmarked a portion of its tangible benefits package to provide free local or regional TV services and the necessary satellite equipment and installation services for up to 31,500 households that were poised to lose access to local over-the-air stations as a result of August’s digital television transition. Shaw was authorized to allocate $1 million of this $15 million benefit to fund the service during an offer period that ran May 1 – November 30, 2011.
In a letter to Shaw made public on Tuesday, the CRTC said that Shaw may extend the program's offer period for another year to November 30, 2012, and approved Shaw’s proposal to allot an additional $2.5 million of the LTSS benefit to marketing the service in affected markets.
The Commission did, however, deny Shaw’s request to allow a “LTSS surplus” of $10 million to be redirected towards Shaw Direct’s roll-out of advanced MPEG-4 compression technology.
It also encouraged the Calgary-based communications giant to use “all necessary measures” to ensure that all eligible viewers are provided with access to the program, after noting that it had received “a number of reports” that Canadians who had lost access to over-the-air signals were deemed ineligible by Shaw.
