Less than a month before the next batch of specialty channels and the particulars in play are mesmerizing.

At Playback press time nothing has been officially announced, but the stats on tier three circulating include a price point between $5.99 and $6.99. The number of services in the pack are reportedly a minimum of 14 from Rogers Communications, 11 or 12 from Shaw Communications and up to nine from Cogeco Cable.

At Rogers, Speedvision, Food-TV and WTBS-TV are thought to be the latest additions to the u.s. lineup, which already includes Black Entertainment Television, The Golf Channel and Family Channel. At the Canadian end, the desire for continuity among packages from the cable majors and its rock-bottom cable fee may springboard the Clairvest-controlled Headline Sports onto the Rogers system. Licensed as an alphanumeric sports scores service, Headline Sports is already in two million households via Shaw.

Rounding out the package will be teletoon, History Television, Comedy Network, Outdoor Life, Space: The Imagination Station, HGTV-Canada and Global Television’s Prime tv.

A latecomer to the Rogers pack could be wnyo-49, a Warner Bros. network. An application is in process to add the service, a mix of cartoons, feature films and stripped sitcoms already available over the air, to discretionary tiers on its Ontario offerings.

Shaw is expected to be on-side with most of the U.S. feeds including WTBS, an Atlanta-based superstation. Treehouse TV may too find its way onto the Shaw system.

The optimists among the broadcasters are eyeballing the $7-range subscriber fee with the idea that it may simply act as an incentive for consumers to buy the combination cable channel package instead of individual tiers. The pessimists are saying words unprintable in a family publication.

Also raising hackles is the way in which the marketing plan is being handled. ‘The whole process is being dictated by the cable companies,’ says one amongst the disgruntled.

‘It’s a wrestling match to spend it in a way that highlights the services primarily, not the cablecos. The only ones that were allowed to pitch for the job were Rogers’ and Shaw’s ad agencies. Who exactly are you going to be most concerned about satisfying: your long-term employer or a group you have a three-month contract with?’

There is also a push from the Canadian contingent to pull marketing dollars from the u.s. services, a request going nowhere fast.

In the meantime, should a marketing campaign get off the ground and the new services actually launch on Oct. 17, year one sales revenue projections could be a difficult haul for the inductees. ‘I think they’ve lost money, frankly,’ says Sunni Boot, managing director for Optimedia.

‘Not that we’re not going to spend in October or November, but September is the hot season and we really wanted the availability of those stations sooner. September is a much higher demand season than January, and at that point we’re not going to shift money out of the mainstream networks. They’re guaranteed and these guys aren’t. There’s no way I’m going to tell my clients to move their money over to these guys which may or may not have X% penetration.’

At the same time, as many of the regulatory absolutes seem in free-fall, winding their way through crtc processes are applications from Shaw and Videotron Communications requesting exemption from the tiering and linkage rules.

Earlier this year the commission blessed Telus its request for exemption from distribution linkage requirements for its market trial. Concerned the decision set a precedent for the cable companies, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters filed a letter to the Governor in Council this summer. It ruled the Telus decision was ‘pilot project’ specific and allowable, but made the point that it did not apply to any other broadcast undertaking.

Weeks later, Shaw and Videotron are requesting the same exemption in order to facilitate dvc trials and on the grounds that fair competition means all distributors must operate by the same rules. They suggest that a new mix of services triggered by the abolition of tiering and linkage rules would create a subscriber base for digital boxes and thereby ‘support the launch of new Canadian digital specialty services.’

Among the points in its intervention against the applications, cab says the ‘fair competition’ argument is groundless. The applicants are established distributors ‘who have been promising the Commission that they were on the threshold of a digital set-top box rollout for years. Telus, on the other hand, is licensed only on a very limited and experimental trial basis.’