Pelmorex, CBC and ExpressVu vie for public warning licence

Three broadcasters have thrown their respective hats in the ring as potential suppliers of a national television-based alert system for warning Canadians of natural disasters and other emergencies, but at least one constituency is panning all three applications. Paul Temple, senior VP of regulatory and strategic affairs at Oakville ON-based Pelmorex Communications Inc., one of the hopefuls in the all-channel alert process, says there is an urgent need for a system to instantly advise Canadians when their lives and property are in danger. "There’s no national public alerting service in Canada at all," he says. "I don’t think people really realize that…I think they just kind of assume there’s a way they’d be warned, when in fact there isn’t." As the parent company of The Weather Network and MétéoMedia, Temple argues that Pelmorex has a natural competency for monitoring adverse weather conditions, and has trademarked the term "All-Channel Alert" to refer to its proposed in-house monitoring and reporting service. It is asking that the CRTC amend its licence to make carriage of the All-Channel Alert service mandatory for all DTH and Class 1 cable BDUs currently carrying The Weather Network and MétéoMedia, with optional carriage for smaller Class 2 and Class 3 cable systems. The other two applicants, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Bell ExpressVu Inc., propose similar offerings but would instead aggregate the alerts from other sources, and have yet to identify a third-party service provider to fulfill the monitoring and reporting function. A public hearing concerning all three applications will convene May 1 in Gatineau QC. While Pelmorex’s proposal has certainly garnered the lion’s share of backing – Temple says he’s received copies of more than 700 expressions of support from such organizations as the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness, the Canada Safety Council and various municipal governments across the country – the Canadian Association for the Deaf (CAD) filed an intervention expressing its disapproval for all three applications. "None of the applicants address, or even appear to be aware of, the long-standing problem of emergency messages being blocked out by closed captioning," a submission filed by CAD executive director James Roots reads. "This is a very serious oversight that must be included in any application to provide an all-channel alert service." However, Temple says Pelmorex’s proposed service would work around closed captioning by offering a full-screen text alert or other formats. "Our hope is to accommodate the needs of the hearing-impaired so that there’s no conflict with closed-captioning or anything like that." While he says he hasn’t yet had time to read the CAD’s intervention, he says he believes the All-Channel Alert "is a service that you’ll find in the end they’ll be quite happy with." In addition, Pelmorex’s proposal includes a 1-800 number that would provide real-time information for visually impaired citizens. If Pelmorex’s application gets the green light, it stands to broaden the scope of its operations – and its revenue base. To cover the costs of operating and administering the All-Channel Alert service, the broadcaster is proposing changes to its conditions of licence that would award it an extra $0.08 per subscriber per month, on top of the per-subscriber-per-month rate of $0.23 it charges now for basic service distribution of The Weather Network and MétéoMedia. With the CRTC reporting slightly more than nine million individual subscriptions to television broadcasting BDUs (cable, DTH and other) in Canada in 2003, the firm would see its revenues increase by more than a third under its proposed conditions of licence, meaning more than $8.7 million worth of additional revenue for Pelmorex annually. In case the CRTC refuses Pelmorex’s request for an increase in the subscriber rate and instead finds that the service be funded from general revenue, the company has also requested that the commission approve a $0.13 increase in the wholesale rate it currently charges DTH and Class 1 cable BDUs for access to The Weather Network and MétéoMedia, taking that figure to $0.36 a month. Temple defends those additional fees, saying that the All-Channel Alert service is more expensive than the competing models proposed by the CBC and Bell ExpressVu. "This is not just putting a box somewhere, this is a full…end-to-end service," Temple says, adding the offering has to be set up "to receive and process an alert from any jurisdiction in Canada," meaning from all levels of government and their agencies. In addition, Temple continues, "you have to be sure that they get to the right area – you don’t want Halifax warnings showing up in Regina – and you have to have an operations centre fully redundant with a stand-alone backup centre. Then, there thousands of pieces of equipment in the field, you’ve got to make sure it’s regularly tested and repaired, parts are available, . It’s not a trivial task….It’s much more than just a box in a cable headend." While Bell ExpressVu’s proposal specifies that no additional monthly fees would be required of its subscribers, both it and the CBC said they’ll seek funding from the federal government through Industry Canada’s Canalert program, a public alerting initiative that got underway in 2002. However, Temple says there’s no guarantee that such funding will ultimately be available, and the All-Channel Alert proposal doesn’t hinge on it. "We’re prepared to go ahead regardless: we filed our application before Canalert was ever announced," he says.

Pelmorex, CBC and ExpressVu vie for public warning licence

Broadcast | April 10, 2006

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