OTTAWA – As a coincidence, the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications heard as witnesses on Wednesday evening Janet Yale, head of the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review expert panel and Monique Simard, one of its members.
Of course, both were attending the International Institute of Communications (IIC) Conference the same day and heard of the challenges the industry is facing but as Yale said in her opening remarks to the Senators: “Our mandate is very much based on generating recommendations in aid of legislative change. For that reason, we intend to push stakeholders to be as specific as possible in their representations, because it’s not enough to simply hear about the challenges. Those are pretty well documented.
“Our real ambition is to identify remedies. We are placing a premium on the practical, the technical, and those ideas that are specific and able to help us identify how that change might be realized in a legislative context.”
Most of the questions by senators had to do challenges as well as the discussions at the IIC both on stage as well as in the corridors. Other questions by senators were premature since the Panel cannot pronounce at this point any direction it’s leaning.
But, as the CRTC’s Harnessing Change report suggested in May – and most of the participants at the IIC agree – the need to create a level playing field in terms of the new digital giants operating in Canada is acute. “Recognize that there are social and cultural responsibilities associated with operating in Canada. All players benefitting from the Canadian broadcasting system should participate in an appropriate and equitable manner,” reads the CRTC’s report.
“We see the evolution to more and more subscription-based models to replace the advertising revenues that were there in the past.” – Janet Yale, BTLR panel chair
The consensus seems to include the Panel itself: As Janet Yale offered:” Certainly, the FAANG gang as they are called (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) are very much on our minds when it comes to Canadian cultural issues, in terms of people accessing audiovisual content outside the current regulated system. As Monique indicated, we know that they are scooping up a huge amount of the advertising revenues that would have been available previously to support the Canadian cultural sector.
“So, we see the evolution to more and more subscription-based models to replace the advertising revenues that were there in the past. Are market solutions—subscription models, other ways to adapt to the change—sufficient to ensure that we have a robust, vibrant, world-class communications sector, or is there a need for other forms of intervention that would be necessary in a legislative framework to address them and other things?”
Again, we are discussing challenges, but an implementation scheme would be tricky. The devils as they say are in the details and while Netflix being strictly involved in broadcasting the rest of the FAANG gang is not as cleanly defined.
Those thorny details will have to be worked in not the Interim Report expected in the spring of 2019, which will narrow these issues on the table. “It will speak to what we have heard and will probably highlight areas of major consensus or major conflict that emerged from our outreach, said Yale, but in the detailed final report expected in January 2020.
The Senate Committee Chair said its report would be issued by the end of June 2019 – about same time as the interim report from the BTLR panel.
The members of the expert panel were the keynote event of the IIC Canadian Conference as they discussed their mandate and Cartt.ca will have a report from that lengthy session on Friday.
