Battling Canada’s television giants

Jan Pachul has landed himself in a classic David versus Goliath scenario. Last week, the CRTC rejected the Toronto businessman’s application for a community television station for east Toronto (see lead story). But it appears the battle is far from over. Pachul made his pitch for Star Ray TV before a panel of five CRTC commissioners in Hull last December. Below is an edited transcript of his presentation, which includes his company’s vision for community TV. So far what we have done is like an old fashioned barn raising where people in the community get together for a common cause and decide to do it. There has been a whole group of people doing this for over a five-year period, an army of volunteers. One thing that I want to bring up is the "Star Ray TV Viewers Bill of Rights"; the things that we consider annoying about television, ways we could distance ourselves from our competitors, and also other things that we considered to be within our pro-social mandate. Article 1: "It is resolved that TV is a fun activity." We want to express our happiness and our exuberance through our personalities and the way we present ourselves on TV. Article 2: "It is resolved that no ‘talking-down-to-you hyper personalities are allowed on Star Ray TV. We talk to you like you are our neighbour." We try to emulate that style in everything we do. Yes, we are from Toronto but we don’t want to exhibit that Toronto attitude. Article 3: "It is resolved that Star Ray TV will not display logos or other junk on the side of the screen during programs." Now, that is something that has always bugged me. They are getting full colour, animated, and they are straight through the program — for what reason I don’t really know. Something else that seems to bug a lot of people: "It is resolved that no shaky camera work will appear on Star Ray TV. We are your eyes. Your eyes don’t shake around unless you are very drunk." It seems that trendy TV these days is all pan and zoom. There seems to be a real lack of content. We want to be content rich, where we are actually supplying people with some information. I think what is happening now is that style is triumphing over substance in television. So we want to get back to some substance in TV. Here is another one: "It is resolved that Star Ray TV will not use popups or frames on the station or website." There has been a movement to integrate the Internet with television by having various popups that you can push on your screen. We feel that this detracts from viewing television. If you want to watch the Internet watch the Internet. I don’t think convergence is going to occur in that manner, where you will see a cross between TV and the Internet. I think you are going to see TV on the Internet. I think that is the direction we are going into similar to this "icraveTV" which just debuted in Toronto a few days ago. We consider this very important. I think this has a lot to do with what makes Star Ray TV different. I think that this is also the reason why we have as many opposing interventions as we do, because I don’t think any of our opposition like the idea that we want to air 100% Canadian content during prime time. But if a station did this, you would actually reduce your financial success, because obviously you can make a lot more money pushing a network switch and just running a satellite feed from the U.S. It is a lot more work to produce your own programming. We decided not to do any news programming because we felt that that was an unnecessary duplication in the market. So the idea behind our "Public Forum" show was that we would cover one issue in-depth rather than giving you little snippets of the days activities. (Another pledge): "In an emergency situation Star Ray TV pledges to do whatever it takes to stay on the air to help you through." We have a rather unique situation because we have a broadcast site that is away from the CN Tower. If anything happened to the CN Tower we would be it. There wouldn’t be anybody else on the air. We have designed our whole plant to sustain emergency operation under generator power for long periods of time. We are going to be using gasoline generators, so if worst comes worst we will just ask for donations of gas cans on the air to keep going, if we have to. That’s about it for the "Viewers Bill of Rights".

Battling Canada’s television giants

News | 08/31/2000 4:00 am EDT

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