OTTAWA – A coalition of American border television stations has banded together calling for fair compensation for their over-the-air programs that are being imported and retransmitted in Canada.
"It is regrettable that imported U.S. TV stations are denied consent and remuneration rights under Canada's new distant station retransmission regime," said Marla Drutz, Vice President and General Manager of WDIV-TV in Detroit, Michigan, in a press release.
"Given the success and importance of the Canada-U.S. trade partnership we remain hopeful this unfair situation will be put right by Canada and our U.S. stations will be included under the consent and remuneration provisions," said Susan Wenz, Program Director at KSTP-TV in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the same release.
"Our channels deliver value for Canadians," said Chris Musial, General Manager for WIVB and WNLO-TV in Buffalo, New York. "We expect the right to negotiate appropriate compensation for the full value that our signals and programming deliver to Canadian markets."
The group maintains that Canada's Broadcasting Distribution Regulations were amended in 2011 to provide retransmission consent and new remuneration rights for operators of distant TV stations, but that American TV stations imported into Canada are being “denied an equitable and non-discriminatory right of remuneration exercisable under conditions set out in the new distant station regime.” What these stations want is more than the money they already receive indirectly from this fund.
SNL Kagan this week released its retransmission fee projections and expects U.S. TV station owners to reap $5.5 billion by 2017 and break $6 billion by 2018, versus the $2.36 billion projected for 2012. It said the increased projections are due to the success of a wider range of TV station owners in securing sequentially higher retrans fees from multichannel operators over the last year of negotiated deals.
SNL Kagan projects that by 2018 the average fee paid per TV station will be slightly less than $1.00, while each multichannel subscriber will be responsible for aggregate retrans fee revenue of $4.86 per sub per month. For all five major broadcast networks combined in 2015, multichannel providers are expected to pay $3.49 per month, or an average retrans fee of 74 cents per TV station per month, which is significantly below the $6.37 per sub per month that multichannel providers are projected to pay for ESPN, $1.50/sub/month for TNT or the $1.49 sub/month for NFL Network.
Cartt.ca will have more on this developing story (which is more complicated than it first appears) as it unfolds.
