BANFF – CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein is one busy guy these days – just ask him. “We have a hearing virtually every month which is unheard of”, he told Cartt.ca on Monday morning at the Banff World Festival.
A few of the biggest broadcast-related issues on his plate at the moment – the pending digital transition and the impact that the over-the-top services are having in Canada – figured prominently in his annual breakfast speech to delegates here on the confab’s first full day.
Congratulating the country’s TV broadcasters on their efforts to date to comply with August 31st deadline, which he continues to maintain is “non-negotiable”, von Finckenstein also issued a warning to TV service providers not to turn the transition into a marketing opportunity to upsell digital television equipment and subscriptions.
“I hope the BDUs won’t mix things up by pushing everybody to become a digital customer and buy a digital box by September 1st”, he said. “It will confuse people. One has nothing to do with the other and they should keep them separate.”
Turning his focus to over-the-top services (OTT) and the impact that cord cutting, or cord shaving, is having in Canada, von Finckenstein admitted that he doesn’t have all the answers.
“It’s a huge issue and it’s much more than Netflix”, he said. “It’s moving very fast and I don’t want to have to deal with it when it’s too late. Maybe it’s not even ours (the CRTC’s). Maybe it’s something that should be done by legislation. But I want to understand it. I want to know what the hell is going on here.”
The CRTC recently launched a fact-finding mission on OTT which also calls for public input on the matter, as Cartt.ca has reported.
When pushed by moderator Robert Montgomery about what his “spidey sense” was telling him, von Finckenstein shot back, to much laughter from attendees, that he prefers to “deal with facts, not spidey sense". "But it’s not going to go away, that’s for sure”, he added.
The CRTC chair said that the country’s four vertically integrated companies (Bell Media, Shaw Media, Rogers and Quebecor) “are in the best position” to defend against the negative impacts of OTT because they can "transfer (their) customers slowly but surely from the cable side to the ISP side".
“If you’re just an independent producer, you may be more exposed” he continued. “But on the other hand, if this really takes off, you may have another door to knock on. It’s tough to get a handle on it.”
Cartt.ca senior editor Lesley Hunter is in Banff this week covering the 2011 Banff World Media Festival.
