New pay TV licence will remain as is

The Department of Canadian Heritage last week denied a request to refer a May decision on a new pay TV service back to the CRTC based on its proposed levels of closed captioning and descriptive video. Earlier this summer, when the commission was weighing applications for a new pay TV service to rival two incumbent offerings, Astral Media Inc.’s The Movie Network and Corus Entertainment Inc.’s Movie Central (CCR, May 19/06), it cited several deficiencies in the application by Allarco Entertainment Inc. As a result, the broadcaster’s counsel, Mark Lewis of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Toronto, told the commission on June 8, 2005 that Allarco would provide closed captions for 90% of its programming in the first year of licence. As well, the pay TV applicant agreed to air two hours of described video for visually impaired viewers each week in the second year, increasing to three hours a week in the fourth year and four hours a week in the sixth. However, sometime near the end of June, Toronto-based accessibility expert Joe Clark filed a request asking the Governor-in-Council to refer the decision back to the CRTC for re-evaluation. But the Department of Heritage ultimately denied his request. "I was trying to establish whether 100% captioning and significant if not 100% description was ever actually attainable under the existing legal structure," says Clark. "The answer is no, it isn’t, without filing a human rights complaint. The only way to get 100% captioning, we have now proven, is to file a human rights complaint – even then, they don’t live up to it." In his request, Clark had also asked that as part of its social benefits commitment, Allarco provide funding for a research project into closed captioning best practices. Clark points out that at least one of the existing pay TV services, The Movie Network, is required by the conditions of its licence to air 100% of its programming with closed captions. "The odd thing is, the incumbent has a 100% captioning requirement for programming, including porn, but the new guy gets 90% – they get a 10% discount for being new," he says. However, The Movie Network hasn’t fully met its obligations either, according to Clark. "They may be attempting to put captioning on everything, but in practice there are technical issues that some captions don’t appear, and they don’t caption their subtitled programming ordinarily," he says. "It’s my opinion that The Movie Network is not living up to its 100% captioning requirement. If they were really interested in meeting the spirit not just the letter, they’d caption all their promos and all the other things – it would be a cradle-to-grave service. Every time there was sound, there’d be captioning." Other broadcasters, namely the CBC and Canwest Global Communications Corp., have committed to 100% closed captioning after human rights complaints were filed against them. As he has done with The Movie Network, Clark has monitored the CBC’s programming and, perhaps predictably, found that the public broadcaster fails to meet those stringent standards. "What people should be doing is using the HBO standard of five nines, 99.999%," Clark says. "That’s a reasonable approximation of full captioning." In an earlier interview with Canadian Communications Reports (CCR, June 6/06), Clark noted that a round-the-clock broadcasting undertaking can air more than a month of programming inaccessible to those with visual or hearing impairments and still meet a 90% captioning requirement. Considering viewers requiring descriptive video or closed captioning can’t watch all the programming on a service, they should either pay less than fully sighted or hearing viewers, or broadcasters should be held to higher standards, Clark concluded. However, one of the unsuccessful applicants during the round of licensing says that anything more than captioning 19 out of every 20 minutes of programming might be impossible to achieve in a practical sense. "When we submitted our application, we submitted it at 95% with the idea that 95% is as close to 100% as is really possible," says Cal Millar, president and chief operating officer of Toronto’s Channel Zero Inc., who submitted a rival proposal for a pay TV service. "In order to hit 95%, you have to close-caption everything, and the 5% allows you to have a few mistakes and not be out of compliance….The only way to hit 95% truthfully is to aim for 100% and miss once in a while." Clark wouldn’t have been happy with 95% and adds that he doesn’t favour any broadcaster. "There’s no malice towards the winning application," he says. "Whoever won the licence and didn’t have a 100% captioning requirement, and didn’t have a large description requirement, and didn’t fund my research project, would have received some kind of appeal." For his part, Allarco President Malcolm Knox says Allarco has taken the opportunity afforded by Clark’s request to fine-tune its plans before the channel launches in the spring next year. "The appeal slowed us down, because we took it very seriously, but now that that’s behind us we’re moving forward," he says. "We’ve been reviewing our business plan and updating it, because of course our business plan was put together in the winter of ’05, and we didn’t get exactly everything that we had asked for from the commission with respect to program exclusivity."

New pay TV licence will remain as is

Broadcast | August 15, 2006

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