THE MORE WE TALK to people and the more we hear, the more it looks like the CRTC wants to try and let conventional local broadcasters charge a wholesale fee for their local OTA signals, paid for by the customers of their cable, satellite and telco TV carriers.
Now, the power brokers on Parliament Hill have made it clear they want no part of being blamed for rising consumer TV bills (because you can bet that any new mandated fee-for-carriage would be identified as a “TV tax” or something on customer bills by those carriers if such a thing were ever foisted upon them by government caveat) and the Commission doesn’t want to try and figure out how much a local broadcast signal is worth to carriers and their customers.
So it won’t be a mandated new fee.
It appears instead the CRTC is leaning heavily towards giving broadcasters the right to charge, but leaving the rest up to negotiations between broadcasters and distributors.
The strongest signal that this is what the Commission is moving towards came during a speech CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein gave on Friday to the seemingly top-secret 2009 Broadcasting Invitational Summit in Cambridge, Ont. Organized by the Northwind Professional Institute (whatever that is, since we can’t really find it online), the summit is attended annually by Canadian TV bigwigs and is notable for the fact that only speeches made there by politicians or CRTC execs are ever made public. As far as we can tell, no one has publicized, blogged, tweeted or posted anything from this elite gathering.
Maybe they confiscated BlackBerrys at the door… But I digress…
Von Finckenstein’s speech touched on many of the key – and already much-discussed – challenges facing local broadcasters in Canada. Of course, we don’t know exactly what he said to the conference because he rarely sticks to the written text, but the speech itself makes reference to the players finding “fair market value” for both distant broadcast signals as well as conventional local ones.
The problem for Canadian broadcasters, however, is that such negotiations were just about impossible to contemplate because they are at a severe leverage disadvantage. If my cable company and CTV became embroiled in a contract battle and CTV pulled its signal, I could still get CSI, for example, from WIVB TV Buffalo simply by changing the channel (or from dozens of places online, but that’s another story…)
So the chair’s speech last week had this to say about stiffening the broadcasters’ positions in such negotiations. Under the “Issues for discussion” section, the speech says that the Commission will examine a “requirement of a prior agreement on that compensation as a precondition for a broadcasting distribution undertaking’s distribution of the U.S. 4+1 signals (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX and the non-commercial PBS network).”
Clunkily worded, but it seems to mean that if a distributor doesn’t have a carriage deal with local Canadian broadcasters, it won’t be allowed to continue to carry the American conventional channels airing the same foreign programming until the dispute is resolved.
“I was very encouraged to see that,” CTV’s executive vice-president of corporate affairs, Paul Sparkes in an interview with Cartt.ca.
“We’ve always said… we need something that is significant enough to enable negotiation and this certainly is it. It’s key in coming to an agreement and I’m very glad that the chairman has outlined it in his speech.
“Without that negotiating hammer, we would be left high and dry and the cable and satellite companies would continue to have the dominant position in any negotiation… This certainly gives us leverage to be able to come to the table and hammer out a deal that would be good for all parties,”
“I’m very encouraged the chair has put this on the table.”
What isn’t clear yet is whether or not the current list of broadcaster benefits (mandatory carriage on basic cable and satellite, a monopoly on local TV advertising and simultaneous ad substitution) will also be on the table. Expect cable to again ask to be able to sell ads on their community channels and within the U.S. cable channels’ local avails.
Watch for all of this (and a decision on a changed local programming improvement fund) during the week of July 6th, when the Commission is expected to issue its public notice for a hearing beginning September 28 to discuss all this, that is, the “systemic and structural challenges facing local broadcasters.”
Another busy summer for the lawyers and consultants…
Click here for the full text of Konrad von Finckenstein’s speech.
