Letter: BDUs only want reduced regulation where it suits them best

With initial comments due last Friday for next February's BDU and specialty service regulatory framework review the CRTC and the industry at large now has more than three months to examine the thousands of pages of policy wish lists submitted. Certain to be one of the more polarizing issues will be whether to relax the rules regarding Canadian content and services - with BDUs arguing for lighter regulation and industry associations and independent broadcasters lobbying for continued protection. Kick-starting this debate is VisionTV president and CEO Bill Roberts who, in the following letter to Canadian Communications Reports, takes to task not only the BDUs for asking for more from the regulator when they've already benefited greatly from our current system, but the media for largely ignoring this fact: Rogers Communications Inc. asserts that the primary policy objective of the CRTC should be to lessen Canadian protection and facilitate an accelerated importation of foreign channels.Well, the fastest and most economically efficient way to accomplish that would be to cease protecting Canadian cable companies from US distributors like Comcast and DirecTV. However, that would be against the law - and would trigger a precipitous dismantling of our once-proud broadcasting system.Canada is the only country in the world that competes 24 hours a day with the behemoth US entertainment machine. We have a unique approach of measured public policy interference in our system that, so far, allows us to prosper - the cable companies most of all.Indeed, the genesis of cable in Canada is a pirating of US over-the-air channels that our regulator legitimized into a protected industry on their behalf. Now, Rogers' self-serving approach to the free market's invisible hand has more do with a Corsican choke hold than anything else. Cable companies (and their owner families) have become rich, for generations to come, precisely because of public policy interference in the media system. For cable companies to call for more competition and less protection - is meant for other's - but not for them.Consider this...If Rogers' approach to Canadian broadcasting had been in place in 2005/06, expenditures on Canadian content by pay and specialty services, such as VisionTV's drama projects, would have decreased by $44.6 million - and would have been two or three times that if Rogers, Shaw, et al, had been successful in lowering the minuscule subscriber fees of channels such as our multi-faith broadcaster. Taken as a whole from 2005/06 to 2010/11 the Rogers' and Shaw's de-regulatory drive would translate into $352 million less spent on domestic production.Oh yes, our cable and broadcast distribution companies are patriotically concerned about global Internet threats...and are just doing the sensible thing, n'est pas? What they don't want your readers to know is that they ARE the Internet in Canada.Over the period 2002 to 2005 cable revenues increased by almost $1 billion, for a 24% increase. In 2006, total cable revenues exceeded $6 billion. But cable revenues from Internet access sales alone totalled $1.7 billion in 2006, accounting for fully 28% of total cable income. What disquiets me is these financials are a matter of public record - and yet there is no engaged, journalistic or popular debate. Why? If VisionTV's puny 12 cents (all of which is virtually committed to Canadian programming) is targeted by cable's bullion masters - well let's follow the money. Let's have a robust debate about the consequences for our Canadian broadcasting system. Headlines please!We have a Canadian broadcasting system, indeed a country, only because of adept public policy intervention in the market. For the record - if the CRTC accedes to these cable requests, let me wager here that within seven years cable companies will have wiped out all the small and truly independent voices in the system. We will be left with two or three massive media conglomerates, and a struggling CBC.I can't for the life of me see how this would be a fitting legacy for the former head of the Competition Bureau and current CRTC Chair.

Letter: BDUs only want reduced regulation where it suits them best

Broadcast | October 23, 2007

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