Rogers Communications’ blockbuster attempt to take over Maclean Hunter has been met with as much uncertainty in the production and cultural communities as it has in the financial world.

The manoeuvrings of the two cable television powers, being played out daily across Canadian financial pages, have media watchers trying to predict what a takeover will mean to producers and creators of program content and for the future of information exchange.

On one critical content front, the crtc today sits down to several weeks of hearing several dozen specialty channel applications from corporate, producer and broadcaster interests hoping to feed programming onto whatever distribution system emerges.

From a regulatory standpoint, any proposed deal could not be finalized without crtc approval because, according to crtc communications chief Bill Allen, changes in ownership at either company would affect the terms on which the crtc granted their broadcasting and cablevision licences. The federal competition bureau is apparently keeping a close watch on developments.

Depending on who you talk to, reaction varies enormously to the idea of Rogers controlling access to more than 40% of all cabled households in Canada. At the Canadian Film and Television Production Association, president Sandra Macdonald is nonplused, saying a Rogers-mh deal would not represent much in the way of vertical integration. (Rogers owns cfmt-tv in Toronto, and mh, along with its cable and other businesses, owns CTV Television Network affiliate cfcn-tv (check) in Calgary.)

‘The issue of Canadian control is rising to the fore. It’s good to have big players,’ says Macdonald. She adds, however, that vertical integration of Quebec’s Le Groupe Videotron – owning cable outlets as well as the TVA Television Network and tv station Tele-Metropole – has made the environment ‘less friendly to independent producers.’

As for cable-cable alliances: ‘It’s impossible to worry about Rogers and Maclean Hunter when I think about Bell,’ Macdonald says, referring to speculation that Bell Canada’s corporate owners, bce – with much larger financial wherewithal than Rogers Communications – may be interested in joining the bidding battle for mh or even serving as a distributor of video signals. She worries about the specter of Bell, with or without its telco allies in Stentor, monopolizing signal distribution at some future date.

‘The crtc is obviously grappling with it,’ says Macdonald, adding that the telecom/convergence hearings held last fall raised the issues of telco involvement in signal distribution and possibly creation of content. She doubts the crtc will come forth with its opinions on these issues anytime soon.

Macdonald’s benign view of a Rogers-mh merger surprises Ian Morrison, spokesperson for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. He says if Rogers gets mh, it will control access to more than 40% of cabled households in Canada. That’s bad for program producers and creators, he argues, because any new specialty services will have to negotiate access to cable systems.

‘As you get a mega-monopoly developing, the power of the creators as handled by program packagers goes down. They (the specialties) already have very little bargaining power,’ Morrison says. He also believes cable companies are usurping the crtc’s role in approving specialty channels. He says the cable companies’ assertion that systems can only accommodate another half-dozen signals, at least until digital video compression is in place, shows the cablecasters want to control the growth of the tv system.

He argues instead for furthering competition in signal distribution, setting safeguards and letting the telcos and others in on the action. ‘A choice of distribution options increases producers’ bargaining power,’ he says.

From Liss Jeffrey’s chair, the crtc’s take on these developments is a focal point for everyone in the entertainment business. Jeffrey is a research associate with the McLuhan Program In Culture and Technology, a part of the graduate studies department at the University of Toronto carrying on Marshall McLuhan’s work on the effects of technology on culture.

She says with statistics showing Canadians continue to increase spending on home entertainment, the critical questions emerging from Rogers-mh and the specialty hearings will concern how far the crtc will go to regulate cable and telephone companies in future, how much it will do to assist new specialty channels and their program providers and which technologies are to take a leading role in gatekeeping Canadians’ access to cultural products.

Jeffrey likens Ted Rogers’ bid for mh as a reversal of the think-global-act-local maxim in that she believes Rogers, who suggests he would dispense with mh’s u.s. cable assets and focus his ownership in Southern Ontario, wants to set himself up as a Canadian gatekeeper of information flow.