OTTAWA – While stopping short of calling for a wholesale policy overhaul, CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein opened the annual conference of Canada’s film and TV producers with a wide-ranging speech repeatedly acknowledging that the conventional broadcasting industry is “in crisis.”
Von Finckenstein has often recognized the financial stress on the over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting sector in the past, however, in his address at the CFTPA’s Prime Time conference, the chair emphasized that a “systemic solution to the problem” is in order.
The CRTC, he says, is rethinking the system “in light of technological, economic and industrial reality. This requires the participation of all players – public or private. The CRTC has been regulating the Canadian broadcasting system according to a model that has become more and more outdated and out of sync with reality.”
Von Finckenstein says the model was created at a time when all Canadians had was over-the-air broadcasting and although the system has expanded to include specialty, pay, pay-per-view, VOD and now new media in all its forms, conventional TV “remained the cornerstone” and its regulatory obligations reflected that assumption.
“Now it is still obliged to bear the greatest burden of those responsibilities even as its competitors run away with large chunks of its audience. The conventional sector is becoming less and less sustainable.”
With a regulatory model full of “a jumble of different but overlapping categories with different rules for each,” von Finckenstein says the framework is ineffective. “The new reality will consist of a small number of integrated companies that create, acquire and deliver programming in every possible way, on every possible platform. There will be many issues to deal with, including the role of the public broadcaster. It’s time to stop the piecemeal fixes; we need a structural solution as we look into the future.”
In the near future, a short-term solution will involve the CRTC narrowing the scope of licence renewal hearings, which it announced last Friday. In the April hearing, the Commission will examine just a few issues and look to “help the conventional television sector get through this period” of the global recession by issuing one-year license renewals.
Then in the summer, the process of rethinking the licensing system will begin.
The plan is to put together a framework for licensing conventional and specialty broadcasters “on the basis of ownership groups” rather than on the types of service they deliver. In April 2010, the CRTC will hold a combined hearing for OTA and specialties “and assign privileges and obligations on that new ownership basis.”
Von Finckenstein cited five reasons for changing the licensing approach: the global economic crisis; the decline in advertising spending, especially on OTA broadcasting channels; audience fragmentation, particularly to new media platforms; the increased role of new media as a broadcast distributor; and the diminished role of conventional TV on the media landscape as well as the unpredictable nature of the media environment, which calls into question the practice of issuing licences for seven years.
Sue Tolusso is a freelance writer based in Ottawa and is covering Prime Time for Cartt.ca.
