SO, IS THE TELUS Canadian Football League mobile application exclusive to Telus customers or not? On Wednesday during the CRTC’s hearing into the purchase of Canwest Television by Shaw Communications, that caused some confusion among commissioners – and yours truly.
The day before, Shaw Communications EVP Brad Shaw said he thought it pretty rich that a company with a mobile app that is exclusive to its own customers would want to make sure other carriers aren’t allowed to offer such content only to its own customers. It’s a point Telus has made before and did again Wednesday.
So yesterday, commissioners questioned Telus on Shaw’s point, asking how it can have such an exclusive with the CFL when it says it doesn’t want such deals for others? The executives on the Telus panel insisted it isn’t an exclusive, they have none and no plans for any.
This puzzled me, because I remember our short piece in July – which we took from Telus’ very press release – which touted how portions of the app were available to all CFL fans and how some things were “exclusive” to Telus customers. We quoted the word right from the original Telus release, which we dug out of our ridiculously messy inbox. However, on the Telus web site where that release is now housed, the word “exclusive” is dropped in the third paragraph.
We showed the differences in wording of the two copies of the release to Telus SVP regulatory Michael Hennessy who acknowledged the difference in the press releases and chalked it up to a mistake by over-exuberant marketers inside Telus. “We won’t do exclusives,” he told us – and that’s an edict right from Darren Entwistle, Telus’ CEO, he added.
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THE PRESENTATION LED by Media Access Canada was an effective one, to which we hope many were listening. Representatives from the Alliance for the Equality of Blind Canadians, the Canadian Hearing Society, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association joined MAC’s acting president and CEO Beverley Milligan to ask why their groups were shut out of Shaw Communications’ tangible benefits package.
They pointed out that Shaw is willing to set aside $23 million of the benefits package to upgrade small market digital transmitters covering up to 400,000 Global TV off-air viewers who might lose their TV in the digital transition, but it set aside no money to assist the millions of vision and hearing impaired Canadians.
“Allow us to point out that four to eight million Canadians do not now enjoy the full benefits of Canada’s broadcasting system. They have not lost access – they have never had it,” said Milligan.
The others on the panel decried the slow state of transition to described video (2-4 hours per week) and the decades it took to get to closed captioning (and they said they also didn’t care for the quality of the captioning done now either for that matter). Simply, it isn’t easy to enjoy television with a vision or hearing impairment.
One way to aid these folks and the broadcasting industry would be to “consider the Australian example,” said Milligan, “where a not-for-profit media access organization consults widely on standards, undertakes research, examines and evaluates new accessibility technologies and ensures community awareness. Media Access Australia operates on the interest earned from a $4.5 million endowment.”
From our perspective, setting aside $4.5 million of a potentially $200 million benefits fund to something as clearly beneficial as this type of organization, seems to be a pretty good idea.
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PAM ASTBURY WAS once again in front of the Commission today (albeit by phone) to ask again that the Commission consider the multiplex option as a cheaper alternative for smaller communities, come the digital transition. Basically, all broadcasters in a region would share a digital signal, multiplexed to each broadcaster’s feed. The signals would be able to be shown on old analog TVs, as long as they were fitted with a cheap ($50) converter box.
Astbury said she met with Pattison Broadcasting head Rick Arnish, who was open to the idea, but noted many costs and other hurdles stood in the way.
We must admit though, that we were confused by her tying multiplexing a few local broadcasters digitally with fighting obesity (she said she had a hunch all the channels available on cable and satellite has contributed to the number of heavy couch potatoes and that a small package of six free TV channels would mean people would watch less and get out more.)
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During the Pelmorex presentation Wednesday afternoon, company executives mulled out loud about the negative implications of the Shaw family owning both Corus Entertainment and Canwest Global channels. They pondered the potential for Shaw to shuffle around their channel lineups so that a number of Corus and Canwest channels end up on basic, to the detriment of other specialty channels.
We heard Shaw CEO Jim Shaw react and say something, but we weren’t sure what, until Globe and Mail reporter Susan Krashinsky, who was a little closer, tweeted his reaction to Pelmorex’s speculation. For the record, Shaw’s comment was: “bullshit.”
– Greg O’Brien
