Shaw adds Turner Classic Movies to analog cable tier at no cost

Eight years after getting CRTC approval, Time Warner’s Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is now available in Canada, having launched October 31 in analog on Shaw Cablesystems and nationally on Shaw Communications Inc.-owned direct-to-home satellite TV distributor Star Choice. The reason the U.S. cable TV channel, which features classic movies, took so long to launch, according to both Shaw and the U.S. broadcaster, was due to having to work out copyright clearances for the Canadian market and to negotiating wholesale rights. Shaw Communications president Peter Bissonnette says Shaw’s agreement with Turner Broadcasting System Inc., a subsidiary of Time Warner, has nothing to do with what’s happening in the pay television arena. Spotlight Television is among four applicants vying for a pay TV licence that, if granted, would break the monopoly held in western Canada by Shaw-owned Corus Entertainment’s Movie Central (CCR, Oct. 24/05). Spotlight has proposed running classic movies on its pay TV services, along with first-window Hollywood blockbusters. "We’ve been working on this for a long time. The launch at this time is coincidental, if anything," responds Bissonnette, when asked if the entry of TCM has anything to do with the pay TV applications. He adds, " was getting rights and rates cleared - the typical kind of problems that you deal with when you’re negotiating affiliate relations....We wanted to have a service where the rights are all cleared." The Shaw executive says TCM can now run in Canada without blackouts because the Canadian rights have been solidified for most of the movies. Where the rights haven’t been cleared, he says, there will be no blackouts because Turner Broadcasting will replace the shows at the uplink with programming that can be broadcast in Canada. Shaw ran into problems when it didn’t black out programming for which Canadian rights had not been secured on CourtTV U.S., leading to the U.S. broadcaster doing so at the source. When that happened, Shaw and Star Choice unilaterally dropped the U.S. channel. Eventually Shaw replaced the U.S. version of the channel with CourtTV Canada, which CHUM Ltd. owns in partnership with CourtTV U.S. (CCR, July 17/03). Tom Karsch, executive VP at Turner Classic Movies, says the goal over time is to secure Canadian rights for all programming that is broadcast on TCM. "We weren’t able to get in touch with every single distributor, but we have agreements with most of the major studios. There are so many little guys that tracking them down to get deals done is not always easy," he notes. Karsch concurs that the delay in launching in Canada had to do with slow negotiations. "It took time to find the right business plan that made sense for us and our affiliates," he says. "We went through several different discussions about whether we should do a separate channel . But we really wanted to keep what we think is unique about the channel intact. So it was going through different scenarios, and finally arriving at one that worked for us and our cable partners." Bissonnette says TCM is available to about two million cable viewers and 450,000 Star Choice subscribers. It is on free preview until January 1, and then will be added to Tier 3 on cable, and to Star Choice’s Fun Stuff and Digital Favourites bundles – both at no extra cost. "It’s to provide value add to the tier," says Bissonnette of the decision to offer the channel at no extra cost.

Shaw adds Turner Classic Movies to analog cable tier at no cost

News | 11/07/2005 5:00 am EST

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