Telus, Shaw, say no licence should be granted, and especially not to Bell or Rogers
GATINEAU – On Wednesday, phase II and III of the hearing into a mandatory carriage licence for a national, news oriented multilingual and multi-ethnic television service was the opportunity for the applicants and then outside intervenors to tell commissioners why they believe certain applications are not special enough to warrant a license under section 9(1)(h) of the Broadcasting Act.
Four of the eight applicants chose not to make any presentations Wednesday (perhaps keeping their powder dry for Thursday’s final public reply day) but each of Rogers Media, Corrcan Media Group, CanadaWorldTV and ICTV each took various aims at their fellow applicants.
OMNI
Rogers Media senior vice-president TV and broadcast operations Colette Watson took dead aim at the lack of experience and regionality among the other applications, most of which contemplate being a single, national service, or one with two feeds (however the Ethnic Channels Group application would offer four regional feeds). Rogers has four now, still operates its off-air broadcast stations and representatives pointed out on Wednesday how its experienced journalists in each region are tailoring newscasts and stories to different third language audiences in each region, using the recent legalization of cannabis as an example.
“While CityNews had featured stories every day for over a month, OMNI took a different editorial approach for each of the communities we served,” said Nathen Sekhon of OMNI News B.C. “For our Cantonese viewers, our newscasts focused more on harms and ills, whereas our Punjabi newscasts approached the story with far less concern, speaking more about what the new laws and regulations entail.
“Where one community saw angst, the other saw a weed that grew on the streets back home. That cultural nuance would not be captured by simply versioning the City newscasts into these languages,” he added, taking a clear shot at the applicants who told the Commission at least some of their content would simply be translated and dubbed from other languages.
Watson also called out the ATN/Telelatino CanadaWorldTV application and its belief it can make a channel work for 12 cents per subscriber per month – which is OMNI’s rate now and on which Rogers is losing money. “The only way any news could be produced and aired in multiple languages for that amount of money would be to re-version existing English and French news content into a third language from two of the largest broadcasters, CBC and Global. With respect, Canada’s third language communities deserve more than that,” she said.
CanadaWorldTV (TLN/ATN)
Telelatino president Aldo Di Felice railed against Rogers for its past cuts to news programming. Before it received its interim must-carry license, OMNI had cancelled its third language newscasts, only to bring them back when the CRTC decided in their favour on this interim regional must-carry specialty license (while at the same time also opening up this very proceeding). However “audiences have not returned” to these refreshed newscasts, said Di Felice, citing Numeris figures.
“We’re not proposing to dub over existing finished newscasts. I think we explained yesterday we didn’t intend that.” – Aldo Di Felice, CanadaWorldTV
As for the accusation CanadaWorldTV will be simply “versioning” English news into other languages, Di Felice told commissioners “this is a mischaracterization” of the CanadaWorldTV application which spoke of using raw footage from other sources, like the CBC, and constructing their own newscasts with such editorial aids. “We’re not proposing to dub over existing finished newscasts. I think we explained yesterday we didn’t intend that,” he said.
Di Felice also pointed out what he said were discrepancies in Rogers financial statements in its application which appear to understate future subscriber revenue substantially as well as miscalculate OMNI’s proposed new spend on programs of national interest. We expect Rogers will respond to this Thursday.
Corrcan Media Group
Joe Volpe, publisher of the Corriere Canadese Italian language newspaper, which does do some video on its website, has the sympathetic voice, smooth delivery and sunny timbre of a politician, which of course he was for 23 years. A number of challenges posed to him by commissioners in his original appearance Tuesday were simply “not a problem,” he claimed.
On Wednesday though, the company outlined the problems it had with other applicants, complaining about their costs, inexperience (Corrcan has never been a broadcaster, either) or their lack of original programming. “A clear reading of (CanadaWorldTV’s) application – is that delivering news in multiple languages every day is too challenging. CW's reliance on CBC resources is effectively a translation of CBC news,” he said. Corrcan would hire journalists and make everything in house, he said.
As for Ethnic Channels Group’s application to make all of its programming available in up to 25 languages all the time, “it fails to respond to the ethnic realities of those communities. Although a news cast may be broadcast in Spanish, it will not speak to nor reflect the realities and differences of a South American Hispanic Canadian or a Central American or a Spaniard. This proposal is completely devoid of any real connections to the communities they plan to serve,” said Jean Brazeau, Corrcan’s counsel.
Volpe also told commissioners that the license should not be granted to either of the vertically integrated applicants, Bell or Rogers.
ICTV
Independent Community Television used its Wednesday appearance to tell an interesting story about how ethnic communities in Montreal have been repeatedly failed by the traditional system. This tidier explanation was far better than their shambolic original appearance on Monday.
Given the history of what is now ICI TV in Montreal (and Rogers’ OMNI partner there), it’s time to give a non-profit a chance to own and operate this must-carry ethnic channel as its primary focus, said its representatives.
“OMNI’s failures to deliver on the requirement of the ethnic license is not an anomaly,” said Laith Marouf, CEO and policy consultant for ICTV. “The station known today as ICI-Montreal started in the 1980s as La Télévision Ethnique du Québec, a public access ethnic station. This station did not deliver on its ethnic programming goals and in 1999, Western International Communications bought CJNT and branded it as multicultural station with 60% ethnic programming and 40% American programming.
“CJNT was bought by CanWest in 2000 and did not have enough time to deliver on the conditions of licence before CanWest filed CJNT bankruptcy papers, rebranded the station as CH, and applied to change the conditions of licence to reduce the ethnic programming quotas. By 2009, CanWest sold the station to Channel Zero who rebranded the station as Metro 14 and again did not deliver on the ethnic programming requirements of the licence. In 2012 Rogers purchased CJNT from Channel Zero and applied to change the conditions of the licence to drop the ethnic programming requirements and convert the station to a conventional English service,” he continued.
“ICI-Montreal (or CFHD-DT) began airing programming in 2012 under independent ownership. This year OMNI acquired all ICI-Montreal content and rebranded the feed as ICI-Quebec to fulfill its license extension conditions. Less than two months into the license extension decision, Rogers applied to reduce its Quebec feed requirements for local independently produced content from 14 hours per week, to 14 hours per month, claiming clerical error. The Commission refused the change.”
Telus
As a BDU intervenor, Telus made it quite clear no one should be getting a 9(1)(h) licence in this day and age of consumer choice. “It should not be a foregone conclusion that a mandatory distribution order must be issued as part of this proceeding. The short term distribution order granted to Rogers last year should not be seen as having set an irreversible precedent,” said Lecia Simpson, director of broadcasting policy and regulatory affairs.
With 200-plus ethnic services already in Canada (Telus carries over 80 third-language channels), we don’t need one single must-carry attempting to serve so many languages at once. Besides, the Telus reps said, OMNI is not watched much. Only 1.7% of its customers watch OMNI in a month, said Mary Sun, senior director of consumer products, adding other third language specialty services with much more limited distribution count more viewers than OMNI.
While the company made it clear their preference is no must carry channel at all, it made an impassioned plea to keep such a license out of the hands of Bell or Rogers. “The Commission allowed significant horizontal and vertical integration to occur in the broadcasting sector in order to provide scale and synergies which would facilitate the creation of diverse, high-quality Canadian programming,” said the company’s VP policy and regulatory, broadcasting, Ann Mainville-Neeson.
“To now be considering subsidizing these extremely large consolidated media entities would defeat the very rationale for allowing consolidation to occur in the first place. Granting this licence to either Bell or Rogers will not add to the plurality of voices in the broadcasting system.”
Shaw
Shaw echoed its main western competitor in asking to keep this licence out of the hands of Bell or Rogers, but that if the Regulator can’t satisfy its preference there be no licence granted at all, the wholesale fee of any new licence must not rise above the 12-cents/subscriber/month OMNI is collecting now.
Such channel owners “always come back looking for more,” said Shaw’s ‘VP regulator affairs, Dean Shaikh who pointed out one applicant showed up already asking for more. CanadaWorldTV originally asked for 12 cents but on Tuesday said it would file an undertaking outlining how it actually needs 13.
However, Shaw also took dead aim at Voices, the application by Ethnic Channels Group which would create many hours of third language content but whose application goes further to promise to make all content available in many languages simultaneously (10 in year one, rising to 25 in year four). It is based on the technical solution by which a BDU would transmit a single video feed, and then include in the channel map 25 channels that reference the same video but play different audio feeds.
Shaikh had one word for Voices technology solution: “Impossible.” He told commissioners Shaw had done tests internally and had its third party legacy tech supplier (it’s Arris, but Shaikh did not mention the company) tell them the same, “that virtual channel mapping is not possible” and that in order to satisfy the ECG plan it would have to pass through multiple video feeds, taking up too much capacity in its cable and satellite networks.
“My mother always told me nothing is impossible.” – Ian Scott, CRTC
“Shaw would be forced to drop the corresponding number of channels, which would materially limit programming diversity and place Shaw at an unfair competitive disadvantage relative to any BDU capable of employing a less bandwidth-intensive option,” said Shaikh.
When pressed by CRTC chair Ian Scott who said, “My mother always told me nothing is impossible,” Shaikh did say the company’s objections were primarily surrounding its legacy technology and not its new Comcast X1-fuelled BlueSky TV platform.
Unifor
Canada’s largest union had one main message for the CRTC: Whomever gets the license should be an experienced broadcaster employing full time employees and not freelancers or stringers such as the ICTV proposal, for example, contemplates. “You can’t contract out quality control, said media director Howard Law.
He also highlighted a particular problem among those who work in ethnic media in Canada where low pay is endemic.
“The non union wage rates would shock your conscience,” he said. “The fact is that if you are a functionally unilingual journalist or media worker in any ethnic community including the Mandarin or Cantonese speaking communities, your employment options are significantly narrowed by your lack of English proficiency. Owners of ethnic media operations knows this. The labour bargain that results is what you would expect.”
The hearing wraps up tomorrow when each applicant can make their final replies to each other as well as the above intervenors.
