GATINEAU – Just like fictional detective John McClane has always been the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, Canadian Association of Broadcasters president and CEO Glenn O’Farrell had a similar way of describing the two over-the-air high definition license applicants on Tuesday:
“Put simply, we believe these are the wrong applications, for the wrong licences, at the wrong time,” he said.
HDTV Networks is a bid for a national over-the-air broadcast network with transmitters in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax. YES TV is a license request for a Toronto-only high definition TV station geared towards youth. YES stands for Youth Empowerment Service.
However, says O’Farrell, the financial state of the conventional broadcast industry in Canada shows the market can bear no further entrants.
“(T)he CAB is strongly opposed to both of these applications,” he said. “And why do we say the wrong time? Because profitability is at its lowest level ever – well below the 22% PBIT level that has typically characterized markets where new services have been licensed in the past.
“The applications themselves have serious deficiencies: HDTV, for example, wants to create a national network that will feed programming from its base in Vancouver to seven other markets across the country, but it hasn’t applied for a network licence. It wants priority carriage in eight local markets, but it hasn’t proposed any local programming. And it wants national distribution for its over-the-air service, a request that calls into question whether what is being proposed is really an OTA service or a national specialty network,” O’Farrell explained.
“The YESTV application suffers from other serious deficiencies. It has little funding and offers almost no ownership information, and its programming proposal appears to be more appropriate for a community-based undertaking than an OTA licence.”
The hearing – with intervenors such as CTVglobemedia, Rogers Communications and Canwest making appearances.
