By Ahmad Hathout
Bell is laying the blame at the feet of Rogers for why it is not carrying certain channels that utilize American programming rights the cable company obtained in the summer.
The broadcaster alleged to Cartt late last week that it is Rogers that isn’t budging on negotiations with respect to the carriage of Rogers’s Discovery and Investigation Discovery (I.D.) and other channels.
“The assertion that Bell is refusing to carry these channels is incorrect,” a Bell spokesperson told us. “We have offered to carry these channels a la carte and we are open to them making a reasonable offer, which they have not done to date.”
The comment came after Cartt published a story that led with allegations made by Rogers that Bell has refused to carry the channels. Rogers’s claim came in response to a Part 1 application filed by Bell that alleges Rogers is giving itself an undue preference by proposing to replace its USA Network and Oxygen True Crime channels with its Discovery and I.D. channels in the same channel slots. Bell claims that pushing its channels down the dial would make it more difficult for subscribers to see the channels. Rogers claims the move ensures that its subscribers are not scrambling to find the American programming which Bell used to hold in those slots but lost in the Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) deal with Rogers this summer.
When asked for a response to Bell’s comment to Cartt, a Rogers spokesperson pointed to section 23 (1) (b) of the Broadcasting Distribution Regulations, which states that, “discretionary services that are offered by a licensee … shall be offered as follows: on or after December 1, 2016, both on a stand-alone basis and in packages of up to 10 programming services.” (Underline emphasis by Cartt.)
In response, Bell said it is “always ready to negotiate when the other side is being reasonable.”
The back-and-forth is just the latest reverberations from the earthquake caused by Rogers’s acquisition of the rights to WBD and NBCUniversal programming rights this past summer.
Bell’s complaint came after Rogers filed an application to the Federal Court of Appeal in December challenging a confidential CRTC decision in November that requires Rogers to continue carrying certain Corus channels it wants to shuffle out and to maintain the channels’ numbers on Rogers cable.
In that case, Rogers says it wants to bump Corus’s “Slice,” “Flavour,” and “Home” channels from their existing channel slots in part because they don’t have key American programming rights that it acquired that summer. Similar to its position in the Bell case, Rogers says it wants to replace Flavour and Home – formerly Food Network Canada and HGTV Canada, respectively – with its own Food Network and HGTV channels so that its customers are not confused about where to find that programming.
Like Bell’s position, Corus argues that its newly branded channels contain very similar programming to Rogers’s services, and allowing the cable company to push its channels many slots down the dial will ensure that its customers won’t see them, thus starving it of much-needed eyeballs. Rogers has argued that this reasoning doesn’t really apply in the modern world because there are now convenient ways for companies to communicate service changes to subscribers and new ways for customers to seek out channels, including by using Rogers’s voice-activated search capabilities on its remote control.
