ON THE SURFACE, the 2008 Canadian Association of Broadcasters convention went off with nary a hitch.
Speeches and panels were mostly interesting, attendance was stable compared to last year and the country’s broadcasters did their usual good job in celebrating their best and brightest while we were all entertained by various musical acts over about a 42-hour span at the Westin Hotel.
Behind the scenes though, it’s a much different story. Now, while no one would go on the record with me about any of this, it became quite clear while talking to many people on the show floor (at breakfast, between sessions, in the evenings) that the CAB is – at best – in a state of flux right now.
At worst – it could be fighting for its life.
The national association is still reeling from a significant blow earlier this year when Quebecor Media-owned TVA – the largest private French broadcaster – decided it would resign from the CAB. It’s not just the loss in revenue when a member this big walks, it’s a bit of a perception problem, too, since the biggest Quebec private TV broadcaster is no longer part of what is supposed to be a national group.
While claiming on the outside it’s “business as usual”, the association is leaning hard on other Quebec members to try and talk TVA back into the group. This is happening now, we’ve been told.
And while that goes on in Montreal, word slipped out from a few folks at the convention that CTV is now threatening to walk away from the CAB, too.
This would be disastrous for the association, of course, and rather bad for the industry as a whole, I might add.
As editor and publisher of Cartt.ca, I can find myself in a unique spot sometimes. I’m in the industry, but not of it, if you know what I mean. I’m generally not around the board tables making decisions, but rather the fly on the wall, buzzing about and reporting on what I see and hear. Sometimes I’m invited right into the room. Sometimes I’m outside the doors and the decision-makers come out of the room and let me know what’s been going on inside.
And what some of those decision-makers told me this week in Ottawa was that the association has embarked on some serious soul-searching ahead of a strategic review into how it works and what it does – to figure out in the future how it should work and what it should be doing. “Everything is being looked at,” said one executive who asked not to be named.
Unfortunately for this story, no one wanted to be named, lest they be the only ones hung out on a line for this piece. A couple of people who know better asked me to kill this piece, for many reasons. One said I should in deference to the people who work at the CAB.
And I can say I was tempted. I do have friends in that office and have little desire to add to their stress levels by making them worry about their jobs. But the potential loss of an association that has been the voice of an industry for more than eight decades makes this too important of a story to be swept aside so that just the senior folks at the big broadcasters can decide what’s going to happen.
This is something that needs a thorough airing.
There are no other ways to describe our media world than in clichés nowadays. As we all know, it’s shifting every day and traditional media companies like radio and television broadcasters are struggling as eyeballs flee to other news and entertainment sources. Broadcasters’ profit margins are squeezed already and the current economic climate is scaring the hell out of everyone (travel at both Canwest and CTV by executives has already been curtailed as a cost-saving measure, for example).
And as the media landscape grows ever-more unpredictable and for some, utterly unknowable, it’s a given that the association representing it must also change. But can it? Everything is more fragmented – including the points of view of how to represent the broadcasters’ best interests in Ottawa.
TVA thinks its better off looking out for itself. CTV may be leaning that way, too, apparently. There is a growing notion that the diverging points of view are simply too numerous, the differences too deep, to be able to maintain some kind of common front with an association.
The CAB, for example, was unable to present a common front on the fee-for-carriage issue over the past two years since its largest members – CTV and Canwest – wanted it, while Rogers Media and other smaller specialty service members, sure didn’t.
Even the association’s two largest members are vastly different companies with altogether separate challenges. Canwest, a public company, is a big OTA and specialty broadcaster with significant international holdings and the largest chain of newspapers in Canada. Its margins are getting slimmer and slimmer. It’s debt levels are high and its stock price has taken a severe pounding.
CTV’s margins are dropping, too, we’re told (it’s a private company, after all), but it’s just TV and radio – and all-Canadian – and it faces far fewer overall structural problems as compared to Canwest.
Thus the strategic review on the future of the CAB which is about to begin, with a deadline, we were told, of sometime in the spring of 2009.
What will happen? Who can say. I was told in no uncertain terms by someone who should know that CTV has not made up its mind yet. I bet the Commission hopes a strong CAB continues on (otherwise, who will administer the new Local Program Improvement Fund, for example?).
This week, people have been drawing parallels between the CAB and the shuttered Canadian Cable Television Association. The CCTA’s death rattle began when another Quebecor Media division, its cableco Videotron, quit that group in 2004. The CCTA was finished off in early 2006 after Shaw Communications pulled out. It made little sense for a cable association with one big member (Rogers), one mid-sized member (Cogeco) and a bunch of independents to continue to try and be a national group with such a big chunk of the west and Quebec missing.
“It’s hard to be the voice of the cable industry when it isn’t just about television anymore,” then-CCTA president and CEO Michael Hennessy told Cartt.ca, referencing the various businesses cable operators had entered.
But because of that, however, the parallel doesn’t carry through to the CAB. While everyone struggles to get a handle on monetizing new media, broadcasting is still about TV and radio. There are myriad common issues from copyright to the Canadian Television Fund to dealing with distributors upon which a strong association should lead.
That said though, the individual cable operators do still work together on various regulatory files, even without the oversight of a national association and the Canadian Cable Systems Alliance has established itself as an effective voice in Ottawa for small, independent cable operators.
So what will the CAB look like at next November’s annual conference in Vancouver? It’s hard to say now as much depends on decisions to be made in the coming weeks in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.
And after all, what do I know? I’m just a pesky little fly…
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