CALGARY – A press release issued by Shaw Communications this afternoon that some might term a little imprudent, took some new swings at the CRTC and in the overall direction the Calgary-based company believes this month’s Commission hearing is headed.
The three-week-long hearing has just completed its third day of proceedings (Shaw isn’t scheduled to appear until April 23) into the policies governing broadcast distribution undertakings and specialty services, but the company which owns Star Choice and Shaw Cable clearly doesn’t like the tone of the discussions so far.
"When it was first announced, we were optimistic that this hearing was going to be about making the cable and satellite distribution rules more customer-friendly. We thought the CRTC had finally realized that it can no longer restrict customers’ choice and that it is dangerous to subject them to unfair regulatory charges for television service when they can readily look outside of the Canadian system,” said company CEO Jim Shaw in the release.
“But the CRTC clearly doesn’t get it. At the hearing, we are seeing not only talk about the same old rules and taxes, but even more new rules and taxes.”
While the Commission is unlikely to directly respond to such a release (Cartt.ca has asked and hasn’t heard back), we’ve been in the room for nearly all of the tens of thousands of words spoken at the hearing so far and all we can add is that when chairman Konrad von Finckenstein was grilling Rogers, he had to caution that company’s executives by saying: “Just because I’ve posed the questions, don’t think I’ve made any conclusions.”
However, continues the Shaw CEO: "The ‘fee for carriage’ proposals of CTV, Canwest and CBC – which the Commission dismissed less than a year ago – demanding that cable and satellite customers pay broadcasters a fee for services that are free over-the-air, are outrageous. CBC already receives $1 billion a year from Canadian taxpayers. CTV and Global just paid billions of dollars to acquire more over-the-air broadcasters and specialty services because they thought that was a good business proposition. Now they want Canadians to pay for those acquisitions.
"To add insult to injury the CRTC still hasn’t addressed the gross mismanagement, ineffectiveness and lack of accountability of the $2.5 billion boondoggle known as the Canadian Television Fund. It’s absolutely ludicrous that the CRTC is now considering another tax on Canadian cable and satellite consumers when we still have no answers and no accountability at the CTF," said Shaw.
(Ed note: However, the CTF decision has been taken away from it by the federal government, as we reported.)
"We operate in a competitive environment where to be successful we must offer our customers choice, value, innovation and high quality service. But the CRTC seems to think you can keep Canadians tuned into Canadian broadcasting by forcing them to do so, restricting their choice, and charging them for broadcasting services that are free over-the-air,” added the CEO in the release.
“It is a naive approach that totally ignores the communications environment in which we live where consumers have many unregulated options from the Internet to U.S. satellite services."
