IN THEIR FIGHT against fee-for-carriage (or in CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein’s now-preferred vernacular, "value-for-signal"), Canada’s broadcast distribution undertakings plan to fire every bullet in their chambers and lob every grenade they can lay their hands on to put a stop to it.
It will happen and is happening behind the scenes, on the airwaves, on Parliament Hill, at the Regulator and in the courts. Lobbyists are in full lobby. Researchers are in full search. Government mandarins are mandarining and being mandarined. TV and radio appearances for the executives of the big BDUs are being planned. Expect a full blitz after Labour Day, especially.
The latest, bold, shot came last week when Bell Canada pumped its shotgun and fired an application into the Federal Court of Appeal to try and have fee-for-carriage removed as one of the issues up for discussion during next month’s “policy proceeding on a group-based approach to the licensing of television services and on certain issues relating to conventional television” beginning September 29th.
The reason the CRTC should be forced to put the kibosh on FFC next month? Procedural fairness, says Bell. Given the amount of procedure (fair or not) that I have personally sat through, the two words together, coupled with extended or additional hearings, just give me the willies.
Anyway, Bell’s court filing says, in essence, there hasn’t been ENOUGH procedure. That the CRTC hasn’t let the industry formally comment, reply, re-reply, research, report, present and summarize the fee for carriage issue. Er, again.
The application to the Federal Court of Appeal picks a few lines out of BNC 2009-411 – which reveals the CRTC now thinks a negotiated fee should probably be paid by BDUs to conventional over-the-air broadcasters – and says, basically: “Whoa! We haven’t talked about that NEAR enough yet!”
And the Commission has now given everyone an extra week to refashion their filings for September as it considers the court appeal.
Now, to be fair to Bell and the BDUs, paragraph 37 of BNC 2009-411 says “The Commission is now of the view that a negotiated solution for compensation for the free market value of local conventional television signals is also appropriate.” This is a 180-degree switch from what the CRTC decided less than a year ago.
The Regulator is now saying that because of the deteriorating broadcast TV business model (not to mention the 2008-09 recession), the customers of BDUs should be paying more for the TV signals they could get free over the air but get on cable or satellite instead.
While this certainly does signal a big policy change, it does not require a brand new procedure of its own. This legal challenge is just one of those bullets, one meant to stall, if at all possible, our march towards fee-for-carriage.
As Bell’s court documents make abundantly clear, we have already analyzed the FFC issue to death.
We just don’t need any more paper. The giant telco’s application of last week spells out in great detail the processes spanning from 2006 to 2009 where fee-for-carriage has been dissected and discussed and analyzed and probed and, sadly, even decided on.
The fact that the Commission is once again re-opening the issue might stink, from the BDU point of view, but it’s not procedurally unfair (what’s unfair is having to revisit this issue every few months rather than focusing on providing Canadians with content where and when and how they want it, but I digress).
In fact, I’ll save everyone the trouble right now. If we had another formal re-procedure, the BDUs would pay for more reports and surveys and more consultants to tell everyone that folks don’t want to pay a new fee (except they’ll call it a tax) for TV and that we’re just throwing good money after bad anyway because the broadcast TV business model is broken and that’s the broadcasters’ fault who spent themselves silly in the States and with acquisitions.
The broadcasters’ consultants on the other hand would have their surveyers ask questions differently so that people say they LOVE their local TV and that consumers thought some of their money was going to pay for their local news anyway – and heck, they’re even amenable to paying a few cents more to keep their six o’clock news on. Plus, BDUs raise rates all the time so what’s a few bucks more, right?
The creative side, which doesn’t have much extra money for consultants and surveys, will say that if there’s more money to be flung around, they want some of it and besides, the cable companies are so rich anyway, they should be forking over more dough just on principle.
The consumer, who has better things to do and all their entertaining shows to watch, will yawn and wake up when either a) their cable/satellite/telco TV bill goes up by a few bucks a month (btw – they’re ticked about the LPIF increase this month…) or; b) their 11 o’clock news show is replaced by reruns of Married… With Children.
I’ve said before, I don’t like fee for carriage. And no amount of new words or reams of new reports are going to change that. The Bell application is a stall.
Let’s just get on with this.
