Star Choice likely to repackage more specialty services
Shaw Communications Inc.-owned direct-to-home satellite TV distributor Star Choice will likely repackage more of its specialty channels when the Anik F2 becomes operational at the end of September. Star Choice president Mike Abrams noted during Shaw’s June 25 conference call that the satellite TV distributor has not yet decided how it would package the channels it currently carries on a going forward basis. But he told analysts that there will probably be more a la carte options. Star Choice has been locked in a battle with Pelmorex Communications since attempting to remove its weather channels from its basic package (CCR, June 21/04). It also angered CTV Inc. when it changed the way its specialty services TSN, Talk TV and RDS were packaged.

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The Canadian Cable Television Association (CCTA) has released a five-point strategic plan that is simply a reiteration of its previous stances. The plan calls for:

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The Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) suggests that the CRTC explore the possibility of implementing non-simultaneous substitution (NSS) to cure the country’s TV drama woes. The suggestion was made in the CAB’s June 21 submission in response to the commission’s call for comments on its proposed advertising incentives for English-language Canadian TV drama. A NNS regime would untie Canadian broadcasters from the network schedules of the U.S. networks, and provide them with the flexibility to maximize both the use of the program rights that they have acquired and the scheduling of Canadian drama, reads the CAB submission.

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The cable industry says the CRTC got it mostly right in its preliminary views on a regulatory framework for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony services. Cablecos agree that services that provide universal access to and from the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and use telephone numbers based on the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) should be considered under the same regulatory framework that the CRTC has developed for other telephone services.

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The Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA) is pressing for safeguards to ensure that a CRTC proposal to boost a broadcaster’s commercial minutes in exchange for airing original Canadian drama doesn’t result in too much advertising on the TV airwaves. "One of the largest concerns of our members – the advertisers – with the television medium these days is the detrimental levels of advertising clutter," Rob Reaume, the association’s VP of policy and research tells Canadian Communications Reports. "In English-speaking Canada that is largely due to an American problem, and that is to say that Americans have no limit on advertising."

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