Radio / Television News

Sports, news channels may opt for 18 or 24 hour broadcast day, says CRTC


OTTAWA – The CRTC has tweaked the conditions of licence for mainstream sports and national news channels as it pertains to the broadcast day.

On Friday, the Commission said that its revisions will permit specialty Category C services operating in either of the two genres to choose between an 18 or a 24 hour broadcast day, replacing conditions it set out in 2010

The changes come at the behest of Bell Media which asked the CRTC to provide Category C channels the same flexibility as Category B services.  Noting that sports services such as RDS and TSN offer “a high level of live programming”, the start times or program lengths of which are difficult to predict, Bell Media said that restricting these services to an 18-hour broadcast day was a disincentive to investing in and broadcasting live Canadian programming.

www.crtc.gc.ca