Ottawa to review usage-based Internet billing

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 13 Comments

Industry Minister Tony Clement says he will review the CRTC’s decision to allow usage-based Internet billing, which would raise prices for consumers and business that currently receive unlimited web access. Last week, the federal telecommunications regulator announced that smaller Internet service firms, who provide unlimited access to customers by leasing network space from larger telecom companies, would now pay higher rates to those companies. The decision has generated torrents of criticism from Canadians who say higher usage fees will hinder innovation and competitiveness. “I am hearing from a lot of people who feel this will damage our economy,” said Clement in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “I have to be fair on these things – but I am hearing from people that they are worried this will stifle innovation because the cost of using Internet services will be prohibitively high.” Clement will study the decision to see if it is in line with government policy on competition and consumer choice, and may ask the CRTC to review its decision. The government has overruled by the telecom regulation once before. In 2009, the CRTC’s decision to block Egyptian-owned Globalive Communications from launching its wireless service in Canada based on foreign ownership rules was overturned.

The Globe and Mail

transCam (photo)

Much(less) Music

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, December 10, 2010 at 10:42 AM - 8 Comments

Schwartz, the general manager of Much MTV Group, looks over the $5-million renovation of MuchMusic’s Toronto studios; Gossip Girl; A Much VJ prepares for a segment | Photography Jessica Darmanin; Giovanni Rufino/Warner Brothers

These days, MuchMusic’s downtown Toronto studios look more like the set of a home improvement channel than a 24-hour music station. On a recent afternoon, construction workers pounded hammers and wired overhead lights as a group of young, hip-looking VJs and producers made a valiant effort to hold a production meeting amid the clatter.

The $5-million renovations will make the space ready for high-definition broadcasting, and include a swanky new green room, a permanent stage for visiting musical acts, and a modern control room that will no longer be located next to the building’s large, street-facing windows, through which fans have peered for decades to watch Much’s unique brand of off-the-cuff television being created. “The control room has been there since they launched in 1984,” says Brad Schwartz, the 39-year-old, shaggy-haired senior vice-president and general manager of Much MTV Group, a division of broadcaster CTV. “And some of the components hadn’t been updated since that time.”

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The telecom contrarian

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP/ Jessica Darmanin

Three years ago, Telus Corp. chief executive Darren Entwistle and the company’s board of directors were considering a bid for phone giant BCE Inc., a move that would have created a telecom colossus with annual sales of more than $26 billion. While Telus’s bid never materialized (Entwistle blamed “inadequacies” in BCE’s bidding process), the fact that it was being contemplated at all highlighted the degree to which the Burnaby, B.C.-based telco was the more muscular of the two former phone monopolies, even if the Bell parent was bigger.

These days, though, Telus is increasingly being viewed as an also-ran in the fast-moving telecommunications sector. BCE’s recent decision to pay $1.3 billion for the 85 per cent of the CTV television network that it didn’t already own means Telus is now the only big communications company in Canada that’s not in the TV content game—Rogers Communications Inc. (which owns Maclean’s) has CityTV and Sportsnet, Quebecor Inc. owns Vidéotron, which is launching a wireless service in Quebec, and Shaw Communications Inc. purchased the television assets of Canwest Global Communications Corp. earlier this year for $2 billion. And some are suggesting that could be a big problem for Telus if rivals start using exclusive television programs and sports content to lure new customers to their wireless and other services.

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Can 'Fox News North' win its next battle?

By John Geddes - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

NATHAN DENETTE/CP

When Kory Teneycke announced, back in mid-June, that he would be heading up the proposed Sun TV network, he promised not to be boring. If Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former communications director meant he wouldn’t stay around long enough to grow stale, he was more than true to his word. Teneycke bowed out last week after just three months, saying his involvement contributed to “vicious and vitriolic” controversy over the proposed news-and-talk channel.

He hasn’t answered questions about his surprisingly fast exit, so precisely what aspect of the heated debate over the project drove him to quit so quickly isn’t yet clear. (The day before his announcement, a left-leaning activist organization called Avaaz said it had asked police to investigate who put fake names on its anti-Sun-TV online petition “Stop Fox News North.” Teneycke had admitted to some inside knowledge of who messed with the petition by signing up under the names of Canadian media personalities and fictional characters like Sesame Street’s Snuffleupagus.) Whatever his exact reason, Quebecor Media Inc. apparently doesn’t see any need to distance its Sun TV project from political players. Pierre Karl Pelédeau, the company’s conservative-minded president and chief executive, replaced Teneycke with Luc Lavoie—former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s long-time spokesman. Unlike Teneycke, Lavoie was a TV journalist before he was a partisan spinner, and he’s also a veteran Quebecor executive. Still, Lavoie’s media credentials from outside politics can’t erase the impression that the Sun TV venture is closely connected to insider Conservative circles.

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Muting a bitter TV battle

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

NATHAN DENETTE/CP

Investors barely batted an eyelash last week when phone giant BCE revealed it had struck a $1.3-billion deal to buy CTV, the country’s top television network—a deal that continues a significant reorientation of the media landscape that began with Shaw Communication’s purchase of Global TV earlier this year. The reason? There are no immediate winners or losers. No one has figured out a way to benefit from owning both TV content and the “pipes” that deliver it to consumers—at least, not yet.

In fact, the only one that appears poised to come out ahead in the near-term is the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The country’s broadcast watchdog has spent the past few years at the centre of an ugly fight between Canada’s ailing broadcast networks—CTV, CBC and Global, among others—and satellite and cable firms like Bell, Shaw and Rogers Communications (which own Maclean’s magazine) over the concept of “fee for carriage.” Dubbed a “TV tax” by Bell, Shaw and Rogers, the idea is that cable and satellite firms should be forced to pay for carrying the networks’ over-the-air signals on their services—an argument that’s now been rendered moot by the recent takeovers. “Fee for carriage doesn’t mean anything when the content owners and the content distributors are one and the same,” says Carmi Levy, an independent analyst.

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Al Jazeera's here. Where's the fury?

By Jaime J. Weinman - Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

Jeff Hutchens/Getty Images

It took years for Al Jazeera English to be allowed into this country, accompanied by quite a bit of controversy. But now that it’s here, we don’t hear much about it; Bernie Farber, chief executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress, says that “from what we have noticed, there seems to be little reaction to AJE in Canada.” People were fearing (in some cases, hoping) there would be fireworks from the anglophone arm of the Middle Eastern news channel. CRTC commissioner Marc Patrone warned of “the potential use of our broadcast system to spread ethnic or religious hatred.” But so far, the reaction seems to be something more startling: indifference.

Tony Burman, the former CBC editor-in-chief who now runs AJE, thinks people have realized that “there’s no real comparison between Fox News and AJE. AJE does not push an ideological line.” Farber has a more prosaic explanation: “The number of subscribers may not be large enough” for people to complain about anti-Western coverage, since it’s not available in all parts of Canada. But it may also be that AJE is not exciting enough to be controversial. On a network that devotes half an hour to Avi Lewis interviewing Cornel West, or four minutes to a reporter walking around the oil sands in Alberta, shock value is in short supply.

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More CRTC Links and Opinions

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:29 AM - 1 Comment

Another round-up of posts and articles on the CRTC’s recent decision:

- Our own Andrew Coyne says that the CRTC got it mostly right.

- John Doyle argues that the CRTC exists to “find a solution that assuages the interests of corporations and does the best for the consumer, both in the sense of cable’s bill-paying customers and consumers of local news and other Canadian programming.”

- Denis McGrath has his own opinion on the matter, as does

- Howard Bernstein, who says that it’s a “watery half decision that will satisfy no one and resolve little.”

- Bill Brioux is back with thoughts on how this decision will affect the CBC.

- Finally, the Globe’s James Bradshaw writes about the decision’s impact on the creative side of TV, and the loopholes that exist in a new-media age — namely, that with so many different places to show programs, companies can put their Canadian content where they think it will do them the least damage:

The decision will also require the broadcasters to spend 5 per cent of their gross revenues on “programs of national interest,” meaning dramas, comedies, documentaries and Canadian-focused awards shows. But they won’t be told where or when to air them, and in a nod to a public that increasingly gets its television through new media, the broadcasters will be allowed to produce this content on any platform. Some shows could end up as Web-only series, for example.

“It’s great that broadcasters are being told to spend money on Canadian drama, but they’re not being told they have to air it,” said actor Nicholas Campbell, formerly of the hit series Da Vinci’s Inquest. “Instead they’ve been given free rein to dump all of their drama on their specialty channels while feeding Canadians a steady diet of made-in-the U.S. programs in prime time,” Campbell said.

The CRTC got it (mostly) right

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 6:07 PM - 68 Comments

I am writing this with trembling hands, willing my fingers to type the words I never thought to see under my name: The CRTC Made The Right Decision.

You can imagine my surprise. Certainly it must have come as a shock to the parties in the longrunning fee-for-carriage dispute. Both sides were demanding, and expecting, that the CRTC would guarantee them a living, as it had always done in the past. The cable (and satellite) companies expected the CRTC to continue to force the broadcasters to provide them with content for free. The broadcasters expected the CRTC to force the carriers to pay them for their signals. And if it had just been one or the other pressing their case, I’m sure the CRTC would have happily obliged.

But it couldn’t satisfy both of them, and rather than split the difference the CRTC has chosen to get out of the game altogether. Rather than forbid the broadcasters from charging for their signals, the CRTC will now allow it. Only rather than force the cable companies to carry the signal at whatever fee the broadcasters would like to charge, the cablecos will have the right to drop them, if they find the price too high — no more “must-carry.” (As, for their part, the broadcasters will be able to withdraw their signal — and “black out” programs on other networks for which they hold the Canadian rights — if the price is too low. Or they can just stick with the current system.)

In other words, rather than bind the hands of one side or the other, or worse, set the fee itself at some arbitrary level, the CRTC is leaving the two sides, buyers and sellers, to negotiate the fee between them. You know, like in any other business. Why, it’s almost as if I wrote the decision myself.

Oh sure, the rest of it is the usual bilge: Canadian content quotas, both in terms of airtime (but down from 60 per cent to 55!), and spending (30% of gross revenues overall, 5% of it on “programs of national interest”), though broadcasters will have greater flexibility to shuffle all this unwanted Cancon about the dial. But why let all that spoil a good day? Here at Andrew Coyne’s Blog, we’re all about the love. The CRTC got at least one decision right.

Well, almost right. Two corollaries are needed before I start breaking out the party hats. One, if cable companies are no longer to be obliged to carry signals, consumers should no longer be obliged to pay for them. The cablecos may decide they can live with the fees the broadcasters are charging, but consumers may think otherwise. As long as the cablecos can just pass the fee along to consumers, via the forced bundling of channels, they will have little incentive to drive a hard bargain with the broadcasters. So pick-and-pay is the logical, and long-delayed, next step, allowing consumers to choose precisely which channels they will and will not pay for.

The other bit of unfinished business is the CBC. The Corpse is mightily put out that the commission did not give it the same green light to charge for its signal, and I can’t say I blame it. So let the CBC charge a fee if it likes — but cut its public subsidy by the same amount. Over time, the idea should be to move the CBC all or nearly all the way on to pay. It would still be a public broadcaster, so far as that was thought desirable. It just wouldn’t be a subsidized broadcaster.

But that’s for another day. For today, let’s just all hug and say the words together: the CRTC got one right. The CRTC got one right…

CRTC News

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 6:22 PM - 0 Comments

Here’s a very quick round-up of reports on the CRTC’s ruling today on the issue of signal fees — though the ruling is not final, since the CRTC is leaving it up to the courts to determine the limits of its authority on this issue:

- The Toronto Star’s summary of the ruling: “The federal regulatory agency released an important decision Monday supporting the principle of private broadcasters being able to obtain compensation for their on-air signals, which cable and satellite providers are currently able to get for free… [but] stayed away from imposing what had come to be called ‘fee for carriage’ – where cable companies pay networks a certain amount of money in exchange for the right to include their channels in their packages – by leaving it up to the market to decide what each signal is worth.”

- The Hollywood Reporter gives a U.S.-centric perspective (“the country’s TV watchdog on Monday opened the way for Canadians to be forced to pay to watch U.S. series-rich local TV signals”). Also, The Wall Street Journal has its own summary: “Instead of the regulator imposing a fee for carriage, broadcasters and cable and satellite operators are being left to determine the value of those signals.”

- Bill Brioux blogs his thoughts on the matter at TV Feeds My Family.

- On a related note, according to a new poll, apparently we’re now spending more time online than in front of regular TV sets, but just barely.

UPDATED: Clement elaborates on the Globalive decision

By John Geddes - Monday, January 4, 2010 at 9:10 AM - 45 Comments

In a news story published this morning, Industry Minister Tony Clement seems to explain that the federal cabinet overruled the CRTC last month to allow Globalive to launch a Canadian cell phone business because the government is determined to see more competition in the wireless marketplace.

That might sound like a straightforward position, except it’s at odds with what Clement said when he originally announced cabinet’s trumping of the federal telecom regulator on Dec. 11. At that time, he stressed that the move was “based on the legal facts of [Globalive's] ownership, and not on the government’s position that there needs to be more competition in this marketplace.”  [UPDATED AT THE BOTTOM]

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Wireless wizardry

By John Geddes - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 16 Comments

Tony Clement did his best last week not to put himself at the centre of an uproar over Canadian ownership of sensitive parts of the economy. The industry minister announced that the federal cabinet was letting Toronto-based Globalive into the Canadian cellphone business, overturning the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s earlier ruling that the Egyptian-financed company failed to meet Canadian control rules. But Clement insisted cabinet wasn’t “removing, reducing, bending or creating an exception to Canadian ownership and control requirements in telecommunications and broadcasting.” No matter how far he dug into his thesaurus, though, many expert observers weren’t buying it.

The potential implications of the decision, announced Dec. 11, were just too obvious to be smothered under even the wordiest denial. The CRTC had ruled in October that Globalive didn’t satisfy Canadian ownership requirements because Egyptian telecom giant Orascom holds almost all of its debt, owns most of its non-voting shares, and provides its technical expertise. But cabinet exercised its power to overrule the regulator, accepting Globalive’s argument that its corporate structure puts voting shares mainly in Canadian hands. Clement stressed that the decision was “based on the legal facts of the ownership, and not on the government’s position that there needs to be more competition in this marketplace.”

It was the prospect of another competitor, of course, that had led the big wireless companies—BCE, Telus, and Rogers (owner of Maclean’s)—to oppose Globalive’s bid to step onto their turf. The CRTC doesn’t see the Canadian wireless marketplace as too dominated by a few players: it says wireless prices in Canada are about in the middle compared with the U.S., Britain, France and Australia. But the Conservatives perceive a problem. Two blue-ribbon panel reports—one on telecom alone and another more broadly on the Canadian economy—have urged them to open up the industry. “We believe,” Clement said, “that when consumers have more choice, when there’s more competition, that lowers prices and increases quality.”

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Mitchel Raphael on who’ll be watching to see who eats seal meat and bernier’s blog

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 10:30 AM - 2 Comments

He wore his nerdiest tie just for her
Ferne Downey, the national president of ACTRA, and several actors, were recently on the Hill for the opening of the CRTC hearings. “The actors are up here to talk about Canadian content while the big slugfest is going on between the broadcasters and cable companies,” says Downey. One star who was supposed to be there was Grace Park. She played “Boomer” on the TV series Battlestar Galactica, which wrapped up this year. Steven Fletcher, minister of state for democratic reform and a huge Battlestar Galactica fan, was very excited about meeting Park, who grew up in Canada. Says the Winnipeg MP: “I wore one of my nerdiest ties—it has the periodic table on it.” Then at the last minute Park had to cancel her trip. “I was stood up by a cylon,” laments Fletcher. Downey says Fletcher shouldn’t feel bad; he’ll get another opportunity to meet Park. “She sent me a personal email and said, ‘This is a Canadian cause, Ferne, anything I can do next time around, I am all yours.’ ”

He always wondered why they played that music
For quite some time NDP MP Charlie Angus has been an occasional talk show guest on Wawatay radio, which broadcasts in the Aboriginal languages spoken in its northern Ontario reach. Whenever he visited the station, though, Angus never understood why the staff played the theme from the old TV show Spider-Man. Finally, the hosts confessed that they think the MP, with his flat-top haircut, looks like newspaperman J. Jonah Jameson from the Spider-Man comics.

He’ll be watching you
When the Parliamentary Restaurant announced it will be serving seal meat, Liberal Sen. Mac Harb scoffed, “It is lip service to an industry that is in need of transition.” Harb is often the lone anti-seal-hunt voice on the Hill. “There are others, but they are all in the closet,” he says. Harb will not boycott the restaurant. In fact, “I will go and I will watch who is eating it. I want to see first-hand which of my colleagues is going to make a habit of it. The chef is great [there]. He will probably over-sauce it to bury the true taste.” Even seal-fur fashion angers the senator. He doesn’t think there’s any demand for it and even if there was, “it doesn’t look good.” When Capital Diary mentioned Liberal MP Larry Bagnell’s sealskin vest, Harb replied: “I’m not sure it looks great on Larry. He can’t go modelling with that. But that’s his business.”

Bernier’s one take
Conservative MP Maxime Bernier has been getting better at blogging (www.maximebernier.com). The Conservative party, he says, is not too thrilled that he has a blog, but he sees it as a way to interact with his constituents and fellow Canadians. He writes often about the economy and does videos in both English and French. The first video he did took him more than 30 minutes for a three-minute, 27-second clip in both English and French. Now he says he can do the French ones in one take and the English ones in two.

Calming Baird
Transport Minister John Baird had his deceased cat, Thatcher, cremated last week. (Thatcher is the cat that caused international headlines when a “Thatcher’s dead” message had Stephen Harper’s office calling London to confirm whether Margaret Thatcher had died.) One friend said Baird’s cat had a very calming influence on the minister. So calming, in fact, his staff would sometimes stick a picture of her on Baird’s cabinet briefing notes.

Go Flaherty!
After Chancellor Angela Merkel rearranged her cabinet following the last German election, Canada’s Jim Flaherty holds a new record: he’s now the longest currently serving finance minister in the G7.

Some CRTC Hearings Links

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 30, 2009 at 5:10 PM - 1 Comment

I was a bit out of the loop on the most recent round of CRTC hearings (“out of the loop” means “away and not able to watch the hearings;” I’m never in the loop in the sense of having inside information), but here are some links to thoughts by people who know stuff. Also, on the fee-for-service issue and other knotty problems, the CRTC wants to hear the opinion of Time Magazine’s person of the year for 2006.

Commenters who know stuff

- Brandon Laraby, guest-blogging at Dead Things On Sticks, had a lot of posts on the subject (scroll down). Laraby also commented at his own blog, A Boy and His TV Show.

- Michael Geist, internet law columnist at the Star

- Jim Henshaw at The Legion of Decency

- There’s coverage of the CRTC hearings at Broadcaster magazine (go to this page for the first day coverage).

Save local TV, stop the TV tax!

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:51 PM - 86 Comments

Sorting through the duelling barrages in the interminable public relations war between the cable and broadcast industries over “fee for carriage” — now mercifully coming to an end — I find myself agreeing with both sides.

Yes, it is unfair that cable companies should get to use the broadcasters’ signals for free. And yes, it is outrageous that the broadcasters should be foisting another tax on the long-suffering television public (to say nothing of using their news programs to promote it): because if the cable companies are forced to pay the broadcasters for their signals, you can bet the consumer will wind up paying for it in the end.

In any logical universe, there would be a simple solution to this. In that universe, the broadcasters could charge a fee for their signals if they wished — but cable companies would be under no obligation to carry them. Cable companies could pass on these fees to consumers — but consumers would not be forced to subscribe to channels they didn’t want. Instead of forbidding broadcasters to charge for signals the cable companies are obliged to carry that consumers are then forced to pay for, nobody would be forced or forbidden to do anything.

And in the end, everyone would have to compromise, and to share. The broadcasters and the cable companies would negotiate fees between them — it would be more than zero, probably, but less than the broadcasters would prefer. The cable companies would try to pass this on to the consumer, succeeding only in part.

But that’s not the world we live in — not in this country. In this country, everything is decided by the CRTC, everything is based on force, and as a consequence, nobody has any incentive to share or compromise: it’s winner take all, depending on who can get the CRTC to side with them. So rather than focus on making better programs, or cutting rates, or otherwise improving their product, both sides spend inordinate amounts on crude propaganda campaigns trying to sway the public their way, and thus to pressure the CRTC and/or the cabinet to award them the prize.

So, as I say, I agree with both of them, but only because they’re both wrong.

Is there a future for Canadian TV?

By Jason Kirby - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 18 Comments

In late August, employees at CHEK-TV in Victoria gathered in the parking lot for one last goodbye. After 53 years on the air, Canwest Global Communications was about to pull the plug on the money-losing television station in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to stave off collapse. Then, with just hours to go before the final fade to black, general manager John Pollard announced a last-minute reprieve. He’d reached an agreement with Canwest CEO Leonard Asper that would see the station’s 40 employees, along with a handful of Vancouver Island residents, buy CHEK and run it themselves. But if Pollard, now a media proprietor in his own right, is at all nervous about betting his life savings on an industry that just saw one of corporate Canada’s most spectacular flame-outs, he’s not showing it. “We get to call the shots now,” he says. “We’re going to make this work.”

The daring experiment at CHEK is just one example of the way the media landscape is being forever altered. A perfect storm of the recession, new technologies and shifting tastes has threatened the way conventional broadcasters like Canwest, CTV and the CBC have operated for decades. Now, with Canwest’s move to put itself into bankruptcy protection, a wave of speculation has been unleashed about who will buy the Global Television network. More importantly, questions are being asked about how those stations can once again be made viable. Continue…

Preview of CRTC Coming Attractions

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 5:06 PM - 1 Comment

I’ll have a post up later (one that’s more than three words, I mean), but here’s Will Dixon writing about the upcoming CRTC policy review, and today’s submission by the Writers’ Guild of Canada. The November policy review will of course be dominated by the fee-for-carriage issue, but there are a lot of other Canadian TV issues that need to be addressed and might get lost in the fee-for-carriage coverage. The other issue — of how much to spend on Canadian programming, how much of it the broadcasters should show, and whether the state of Canadian drama would be improved by deeper investment in drama programming — aren’t going to go away. Or shouldn’t, at any rate.

And speaking of Canadian drama, an hour-long drama success story from last season (“success” in this case meaning “was generally entertaining to watch and didn’t get canceled”) is returning next Tuesday; Being Erica‘s second season starts then. I have not yet seen the season premiere, but the description of the new season’s premise reminds me that the basic idea of treating every season as a separate unit, the way shows as different as 24 and Mad Men do, has spread even to light comedy-drama:

Having re-lived some of her lightest and darkest moments, Erica is starting to make the most of her life. Her publishing career is taking off, she is connecting her disjointed family and building stronger relationships with her friends. Finally united with longtime love Ethan (Tyron Leitso, Wonderfalls), it all seems to be coming together for Erica. But an encounter with someone who shares a secret with her (Sebastian Pigott, Canadian Idol) could change it all. He’s slick, he’s captivating and he’s caught Erica’s eye.

Traditionally, a show with a premise like Erica‘s would not re-tool the basic premise after only one short season, but that’s because, traditionally, a show like this would not have a big season finale or an ongoing story thread. The new tradition is that a season needs to have some kind of closure, and that if you get picked up for another season, you start with the character in a somewhat different place from where he/she was at the beginning of the previous season. It’s another reminder that even shows with episodic formats are, by comparison with shows of 15 years ago, heavily serialized today. And that means that few shows can simply pick up in the second season with the hero’s situation exactly as it was last year. Which is one of the differences between Being Erica and Quantum Leap (whose only concession to a second season was to have a present-day scene where characters delivered exposition about the hero’s continuing, unchanged situation).

Canwest’s quiet coup

By Colin Campbell - Monday, August 10, 2009 at 2:08 PM - 5 Comments

It’s the company that just won’t die. After teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for months, Canwest won another extension from its major bondholders last week, preserving the debt-laden company in a state of limbo until at least Aug. 14. Insiders tell Maclean’s that a resolution is getting close, however, and despite the outward calm, intense negotiations are progressing that will see Canwest changed forever.

For the last few months, what was once one of Canada’s largest and most influential media companies has been at the mercy of bondholders who are owed more than $760 million. Sources familiar with the negotiations confirm that the key players include two U.S. hedge funds—GoldenTree Asset Management and Beach Point Capital Management—and one Canadian firm, West Face Capital, names first reported in the Globe and Mail. Since Canwest has missed several interest payments, this small cadre of bondholders could pull the plug and demand full payment at any time—which would almost surely force Canwest into bankruptcy. So far they’ve resisted, instead granting nearly a dozen extensions. Continue…

The CRTC human rights commission 'whitewash': None dare call it conspiracy!

By kadyomalley - Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 11:09 AM - 24 Comments

Including ITQ, at least for the moment, because — well, it seems distinctly possible that it simply isn’t one, and even if it is, it’s a pretty darned incompetent one. But  she’s getting ahead of herself, so let’s start at the beginning.

Last night, Stephen Taylor blogged about a curious after-the-fact edit of a section of the CRTC’s recently released report on Canada’s broadcast policy. He ran the two versions of the report through document comparison software, which revealed that the only significant difference between the two was the removal of the following paragraph:

“The history of the regulation of speech in this country does not engender confidence that such powers will be used wisely. Canada has experienced several instances in recent times where regulatory commissions of another type and armed with a different mission have challenged the right to say controversial things. The struggles of Ezra Levant,¹⁴ Mark Steyn¹⁵ and others have served as important warnings that regulatory authorities charged with combating racism, hatred, and other evils have consistently expanded their mandates, have abused their powers and eroded fundamental liberties. Wherever there is official orthodoxy, disagreement is heresy, and where there is heresy, there is usually an inquisition to root it out. After centuries ridding ourselves of thought control agencies, 20th century Canada re-invented them.”

That revelation led him to question the motivation behind the change — “Why did the CRTC feel that it was necessary to omit references to Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn’s battles with “regulatory authorities”?“ – under a headline that suggested that the “CRTC drop[ped] references to egregious abuses of HRCs” from the final report.

It’s a fair question, yes — but before we all leap headlong off the Cliffs of Conclusion, there are a few things that Taylor’s post doesn’t mention that are worth taking into consideration.

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The CRTC Punts Again

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 6:15 PM - 5 Comments

Update: Given the time stamp, nobody’s going to believe that I didn’t read this post first before coming up with the above subject heading. But I didn’t. Anyway, it’s the only subject heading that fits.

Every few years, the CRTC discusses what to do about “New Media,” and decides to do nothing for a few more years. (Also, at one point does it stop being referred to as “new” media?) Emphasis mine:

Canada’s broadcast regulator has decided to continue its hands-off approach to broadcasting content on the Internet and mobile devices such as iPhones and BlackBerries.

Rather than require that broadcasters adhere to similar rules online as they do on television and radio (such as producing and airing a certain amount of Canadian content) the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said it will leave the Internet and mobile platforms unregulated…

The CRTC said it will monitor evolving trends and will review the decision in five years.

The Writers’ Guild of Canada, which is the fastest press-releaser in the West when it comes to CRTC decisions, argued in response that “traditional Canadian broadcasting content is very difficult to find online” and that there needs to be regulation to make sure that Canadian content is accessible everywhere:

“New media content has become an integral part of the Canadian broadcasting system,” says Maureen Parker, Executive Director, Writers Guild of Canada, “and we looked to the CRTC to ensure that Canadians have the ability to choose Canadian content online. The CRTC doesn’t believe regulation is necessary to ensure that choice – the CRTC is wrong. In our long experience working with Canadian broadcasters, we know that without regulation Canadian content falls by the wayside.”

Without opining too much (one way or the other) on something I haven’t really thought through, I will say only that we really are, in Canada, in the worst of all possible worlds when it comes to online content: we can’t get much of the great U.S. content online, even as Hulu and other sites become more and more important (eventually Hulu is going to have huge TV libraries, and we might still not be able to get it), and most Canadian broadcasters can’t or won’t catch up with their U.S. counterparts in terms of online content. (The most famous and obvious comparison is Comedy Central’s online library of every Daily Show and Colbert Report clip, vs. The Comedy Network’s confusing and all-but-un-embeddable system of Daily Show clips.)

A better bailout

By Nancy Macdonald - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:15 PM - 12 Comments

Ottawa is abuzz with speculation that the Conservative government may be preparing to selectively bail out Canada’s troubled private broadcasters. Tanking ad revenues—partly the result of the shakeout in the auto and financial sectors, two of the largest advertising categories—are threatening to sink parts of the industry. Rumours have swirled that a fund, said to be as large as $150 million, is being prepared to benefit CTV Globemedia and Canwest Global, the country’s two biggest private broadcast networks. For months, the broadcasters have complained to the CRTC that the industry’s revenue model is broken.

Last week, Canwest was granted yet another two-week extension from lenders, as it races to restructure its crushing debt. The Canwest-owned National Post had already announced that it would not print a Monday edition this summer in a bid to slash costs. The Canwest-owned Victoria Times Colonist will scrap its Monday edition altogether. CTV Globemedia, meanwhile, is not expected to renew the licences of several money-losing local stations due in August, and many believe this is just the start of a larger trend.

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Yes, We CanCon?

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 15, 2009 at 4:17 PM - 0 Comments

The CRTC has decided to delay the issue of balancing CanCon with AmCon (YankCon?), announcing that — since it’s getting late and the networks have already started lining up U.S. programming for the new season — it won’t implement the proposed one-to-one spending ratio (equal spending on foreign and domestic content) this year, but that it will be “considered for the following year.” Here’s Grant Robertson’s story in the Globe.  And here’s the Hollywood Reporter telling the same story from a U.S. perspective.

Life imitates Coyne

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 11:02 PM - 3 Comments

“Let [broadcasters] charge the cable companies for their signals if they like — but let the cablecos choose whether they wish to carry them.”

– A. Columnist, Let us watch what we want, Maclean’s, last week

“Liberal MP Scott Simms asked Rogers if it would endorse a U.S.-style system where the networks collect fees from cable companies, but they don’t have mandated carriage as the networks in Canada do. The company said yes, but only if CTV and Global were willing to give up their mandatory carriage.”

– Globe and Mail, April 21

“The political fight over television carriage fees took a bizarre twist yesterday, when Rogers Communications Inc. told a parliamentary committee it would support the American model for fee-for-carriage.

CTVglobemedia Inc., one of Canada’s largest over-the-air broadcasters, immediately heralded the move as a significant step toward solving the crisis in conventional television.”

– Toronto Star, same day

“In response to testimony delivered to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, CTVglobemedia welcomed statements today from Rogers Communications executives on the acceptability of a fee-for-carriage regime in Canada based on the American retransmission consent model.”

– CTV press release

Let us watch what we want

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 4:34 PM - 112 Comments

If Canadian broadcasters were capable of producing a decent drama, this would have the makings of a pretty good pilot: “In a world turned upside down . . . as an empire lies in ruins . . . the name of the game is survival. One man has the power . . . to decide who lives, who dies, and who pays. They call him . . . The Commissioner.”

Naturally I’m referring to the industry’s own abundant troubles. By now you will have heard and read a great deal of the losses the networks are suffering, the jobs that have been cut, the stations that have been closed. And, these being broadcasters and this being Canada, it will have been impressed upon you that the solution to the industry’s woes lies in the hands of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, and its chairman, Konrad von Finckenstein.

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The silence of the Canadian lambs

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 90 Comments

If you missed the CRTC hearings the other week, don’t worry. The exciting plans to annex the Internet to the cheerless wasteland of CanCon enforcement were justified under the usual refrain of Trudeaupian boosterism: we have to create space for Canadians to tell their own stories.

Personally, whenever I hear that line, the only plot twist I’m in the mood for is: “And then I woke up, and it had all been a bad dream.” But, assuming you’re of a more indulgent bent, the question then arises: why do Canadians have such difficulty telling their own stories?
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