The internet has undone the CRTC’s attempts to control Canadian culture
Yesterday was the kind of day future generations in Canada will look at in wonder.
The CRTC has rejected Sun News Network request for mandatory carriage. Photo: Sun News
Imagine, eyes turning to a meeting room in Gatineau, to find out whether or not Canadian cable and satellite subscribers will be forced to pay for a channel.
In today’s five hundred-plus channel universe, that’s ridiculous. In a world with the internet bringing you information and entertainment from the globe, it’s ludicrous.
For Sun News Network, a channel like so many others in this country whose pathway to profitability depends on cable and satellite distribution systems being told they have no choice but to carry the network, whether those distributors think there’s profit for them in doing so (there are capital and operating costs associated with carrying any channel), and subscribers being told the channel will be a part of their bundle and therefore paid for whether they ever turn it on or not, yesterday’s decision was disappointing.
The CRTC refused them mandatory carriage. A distributor like Telus won’t be forced to add the channel to their services; only those subscribers that choose to add the channel have to pay for it.
No doubt Bell — owner of CTV News Channel which, along with other staples of the Bell media empire like TSN, benefits from mandatory carriage decisions — is happy. No doubt the distributors, who under CRTC regulations can substitute commercials they sell in the feeds of “foreign” channels like CNN, are happy, too.
Why let Sun News Network sell stuff when you’re selling it?
But what this really signals is an era coming to an end.
Sun News Network decision by CRTC irrelevant
For someone like me, the whole thing is irrelevant. I haven’t subscribed to television for four years now. Thanks to Internet streaming and iTunes, everything I and my family want to see is available online — why pay cable or satellite fees?
Not to mention that when I buy a subscription to a program, pay a monthly charge to a service like Netflix, or visit a site to pick up a streamed broadcast, the fees I pay are going to precisely what I want, not to a host of channels I don’t.
You generally can’t buy just the channels you want. If I could, I’d happily buy the country’s news channels, and maybe a sports channel or two during baseball season.
All the entertainment? Shark week on Discovery? History Television’s re-enactments of the War of 1812? Not interested.
Don’t watch it, don’t want to watch it, certainly don’t want to pay for it.
CRTC regulation of who gets to see what (or hear what, in the case of radio) started as a means of promoting Canadian content: artists, writers, producers who otherwise wouldn’t have drawn an audience.
That worked, too: bands that were already great Canadian names were still playing high school dances out of financial necessity until CanCon regulations forced programmers to include them in rotations — and started the royalties flowing.
CRTC regulation of cable channels was designed to do the same thing: to make sure fledgling services like TSN could get started in the face of ESPN, Space in the face of SyFy, and so on.
But it’s a dinosaur left over from the pre-internet days (much like the Parliamentary Act that requires the CBC to be available “off air” in this era of internet and satellite distribution, forcing hundreds of millions to be spent on maintaining remote transmitters from an earlier age).
CRTC system deeply flawed and outdated
I don’t fault Sun News Network for trying to get mandatory coverage from the CRTC, as many others have done. It’s how the system is built; its competitors (CBC News Network, CTV News Channel) benefit from it. Whole distribution systems refused to carry the channel (although if subscribers were willing to change distributors they could generally get it wherever they lived: you might have to tell Telus to take a hike and go back to Shaw, but you could get Sun News Network).
Channel location also matters. News channels clustered together, wherever that cluster is (300-325 is the same as 800-825; what you want is to benefit from channel-flipping between the news networks to capture news junkies) aid profits; being isolated in another part of the channel grid keeps casual channel-flipping at bay. That’s why the CRTC did throw the bone of a decision to come in another month about channel organization into blocks.
Still, more and more people are dropping their television altogether in favour of internet-based services; most use some combination of the two. Trying to control what Canadians have access to is over. Where someone may have needed a grey-market dish previously to get channels “not approved in Canada,” today they just go online.
For all of these channels, the era of having a profitable television business by forcing people to pay 50 cents or a dollar whether they want you or not is over. One of these days, a distributor will decide that there’s more money to be made by charging the subscriber $2.00 to watch TSN, with $1.00 going to TSN and $1.00 to the distributor, and bundles will fall away.
For channels with wide take-up, prices will be low: a lot of subscribers will more than cover the cost of the equipment that handles that channel. For channels with narrow take-up, it might be $5.00, $10.00 or $20.00/month (much like some of the special European and Asian channels are now).
For the era of CRTC gifts — to marginal channels of all types, to keeping competitors off the dial, and to distributors with the ad substitution game — is coming to an end.
It’ll be a long, drawn-out struggle — witness how Shelley Glover, our Culture Minister, was busy defending the status quo of Radio Canada just this week — but the days when the CRTC could make or break the television business are over.
The rest of the channels just don’t know it yet.
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