EVEN WITH CHANNEL Zero’s encouraging purchase of two over-the-air TV stations from Canwest Global this week, we are now left with six small market TV stations whose owners have set August 31st as the final day they intend to have the transmitters turned on.
In case you missed it – and you might have, given the timing of the news – Shaw Communications told CTV late Tuesday that, essentially, it had lost its nerve and was backing down from its confrontation with CTV over local television. The western cableco, despite its now apparently false bravado claims of how much its leadership believes in local television, said it is reneging on its offer to buy three local TV stations for a buck each.
Readers will recall that on April 30, Cartt.ca broke the story that Shaw would run newspaper ads the next day decrying the broadcasters’ push for a fee for carriage. The ad also said that it believed in local TV so much it would buy three stations CTV said it couldn’t sell for a dollar, for that price exactly. Within two hours of that story, CTV said it would accept.
Sadly for the 100 or so employees (not to mention their families) of CKX TV Brandon, CHWI TV Windsor and CKNX TV Wingham, the stations Shaw said it would buy, this now seems to have been a cynical political move initiated by Shaw to make CTV look bad in the middle of the CRTC’s license renewal hearing which was happening at the same time. CTV simply called Shaw’s bluff and the cableco took until this week to toss in its cards.
As for the timing of the news, Shaw informed CTV it would not go ahead with the purchase late on Tuesday afternoon, the day before Canada Day. This could be seen as an attempt to bury that change of heart as much as it could. In the not-too-distant-past, companies with uncomfortable news to report would often release it late on a summer Friday or just before a holiday because it was past the usual deadlines for newspapers and the six o’clock news.
Then, by the time the next newspaper was ready to publish, or the next day’s TV news was ready, that uncomfortable bit of news was old news and received less play. Given today’s immediate media world, that strategy works less well.
(Ed Note: We tried contacting Shaw president Peter Bissonnette for comment but have not heard back yet from our calls and e-mails.)
Anyway, despite the shenanigans played by big businesses with the lives of these stations’ hard working staffers, the industry, many employees and the people in the communities look to be facing a real problem. Six stations (the three CTV-owned stations mentioned above plus Canwest’s CHCA TV Red Deer, CHBC TV Kelowna and CHEK TV Victoria) may well go dark on August 31st.
Are there buyers? There could be, we hope there are, and when we talked to CHEK general manager John Pollard this week, he was optimistic. However, when a company with the resources as Shaw walks away from three stations it could have for less than a large Tim Horton’s Iced Cap (yes, we know the “cost” is more than $3), one wonders if any of these stations have more than two months left.
What’s giving them all hope though is three things: Monday’s impending CRTC announcement on a reconfigured (and potentially more lucrative) local programming improvement fund; Zoomer Media’s purchase of VisionTV (which included two OTA stations) and Channel Zero’s belief (it’s our belief, too, btw) that local television works, that local news will lead OTA TV into the future.
