GATINEAU – With weeks to go before the Local Programming Improvement Fund gets cut in half, two independent television stations that rely on it are seeking access to a different fund designed to help small-market stations.
CJON (NTV) in St. John's, NL, owned by Newfoundland Broadcasting, and CHEK in Victoria, which is owned in part by its employees who bought it from Canwest, have asked the CRTC to add their stations to the Small Market Local Production Fund. The fund was established in 2003, to help compensate small-market stations for the audience fragmentation caused by direct-to-home satellite distributors. Funded by Bell Canada and Shaw Communications, it distributes $10 million a year to 19 stations, including those owned by the Jim Pattison group, RNC Média, Télé Inter-Rives, Corus Entertainment and Thunder Bay Electronics.
Both CJON and CHEK make it clear that they are struggling financially and need a fund to replace the LPIF, a fee applied to all television bills that drops from 1% to 0.5% on Sept. 1, and will disappear completely August 31, 2014. CJON received $1.3 million a year and CHEK $2 million a year from the $112-million fund before the beginning of the phase out in 2012.
"Our ability to produce significant amounts of local programming was mainly due to the additional money we received through the LPIF and if we are to continue these escalated levels of production, additional funds are required to replace in part the vanishing LPIF," CJON wrote in its submission. CHEK said it lost 8% of its revenue when the LPIF fee dropped from 1.5% to 1% last September.
Neither station received money from the small-market fund because of a condition that recipients be in markets of less than 300,000 people. CJON, though its network of retransmitters across the island of Newfoundland, exceeds this audience, but its recent decision to shut down analog transmitters outside of St. John's has brought its service area down to 235,000. CHEK, whose market is 340,000, argues an exception should be made because it is in a two-station market, and its competitor CIVI (CTV Two) is being heavily subsidized by Bell Media as a tangible benefit of the recent Astral acquisition.
In a separate application, CHEK is also requesting relief from conditions of licence concerning closed captioning and described video. It argues that it is "extremely difficult, if not impossible, to meet" a requirement to close-caption all advertising a year before other Canadian television broadcasters are required to do so, that it cannot provide two hours a week of original described video, that it has not yet found a way to provide audio description for in-house news and information programming, and that its closed captioning of news, which is done through voice recognition software, has an accuracy rate of 60%, far below the 95%t minimum requirement. "We seek the Commission’s patience in this regard," it wrote.
CHEK also informed the CRTC that a recent review showed it was "seriously delinquent in provision of Canadian Content," so much that "it would be impossible to meet semi-annual or annual requirements."
Comments on the application by CJON are due by Sept. 9 and on the applications by CHEK by Sept. 11 and 12.
