Montreal: With Space: The Imagination Station beaming down this week and Pulse 24 not long behind, CHUM Television is batting two out of five in its bid to lift its specialty licences off the paper and onto analog

In this installment of Perspective, Moses Znaimer, president and executive producer of Citytv, MuchMusic and Bravo!, shares his views on the licensing process and other topics, including Canadian moviemaking.

Znaimer was in Montreal Oct. 10-11 where he was honored at the launch of a Cinematheque Quebecoise tribute/retrospective organized by tv curator Jean-Pierre Laurendeau on the occasion of City’s 25th anniversary. The retrospective continues through to Oct. 30.

While Znaimer says he’s ‘grateful’ Space and Pulse are established, he’s sitting on licences for Star: The Entertainment Information Channel, MuchMoreMusic, and a national educational licence for Canadian Learning Television.

‘I can’t get them out because the Canadian cable industry is providing precious cable space for important things like Speedvision,’ he says.

There is a long history here. Znaimer says the cable industry continues to ‘insist’ American channels be imported into Canada, and packaged with new Canadian services.

‘[They’ve] always felt their business was essentially based on bringing in American television.’ It is this context, he says, that has led to the ‘weird’ situation where the Nashville Network has bigger distribution in Canada than Bravo!

Per Znaimer, cable distribution in Canada is a pyramid scheme where ‘first in’ is best. Currently, the rollout on extended basic is at or over the 90% level, while the next to most recent wave (the ’95 licensees) are reduced to the 65% range. It means virtually all subsequently licensed Canadian specialty channels are at ‘an inherent disadvantage’ to previously authorized American channels.

‘I could see this going on forever,’ he says.

Znaimer was the first to frontline the ’96 pitch to the crtc that all proposed qualified Canadian specialty applications be licensed, and then left essentially on their own to negotiate distribution. ‘It meant that the genre will be blocked and the cable operator will not be able to turn around and import it from the u.s.’

But Znaimer says a licence for a new Canadian specialty service is no longer a guarantee of distribution, but ‘rather a right to negotiate.’

1999 is the theoretical ‘hammer’ suspended over cable heads, the deadline when time runs out on the no-capacity discourse. Znaimer isn’t buying it, saying Death Stars and dvc aside, the key issue remains analog capacity and eligible foreign services.

‘First of all, 1999 is like Never-Never-Land because one is going into narrower and narrower distributions. By the time you’re talking about the tier that will be brought out in ’99 you’re talking about 10% distribution. Try to run a business (in Canada) on 10% penetration.’

The irony, he adds, is that two years and three years down the road other imported Speedvisions will be miles ahead. ‘The Broadcast Act stipulates a predominantly Canadian system. But 50/50 for me is not predominantly Canadian. It’s an affront.’ The question of why The Nashville Network is in almost six million Canadian homes and Bravo! in four million has an answer, says Znaimer.

It’s called `competition,’ from the Death Stars and from the other broadcast distribution undertakings aimed at cable. ‘That has been a joke for as long as cable has used it. Just when did we get a satellite service in Canada? Was it a week ago?’

(Znaimer says that despite the 17-odd positions materializing on Rogers and more than a dozen on Shaw, the 1:1 linkage rules remain in place. This he calls ‘The Great Breakthrough.’)

chum’s immediate interests aside, the anticipated benefits to the production industry and artists from (all the non-distributed) Canadian licencees are indefinitely on hold. The industry is out big bucks, says Znaimer.

Star committed to $21 million in Canadian program expenditures over the term. MuchMoreMusic is in for $17 million plus an extended Videofact component (plus the unrecouperable marketing benefits loss to artists whose videos won’t be broadcast) and clt is in for another $20 million.

Znaimer says the shelving of clt ‘is the most grievous of all.’ He claims all the research ever done by cable, by the commission and by applicants makes it clear Canadian families want a real adult-educational service in the specialty bouquet. ‘Not a soft pbs thing but a channel which actually leads to courses, to credits and diplomas and an improvement in one’s life.’

Pulse 24’s Cancom spending is pegged at $17.7 million over the seven-year term.

chum has five new specialty applications in process, three out of Toronto and two out of Access in Edmonton. (The hearings are slated for Spring ’98.) The applications are: Fashion Television: The Channel ($23 million over the term in Canadian programming commitments), The Suspense Channel ($26 million) and The Independent Film Channel ($26 million in Canadian feature films and related programs).

The Access Alberta-sponsored applications are Travel Access, an educational travel service, and The Computer & Technology Channel (both in excess of $20 million over the term).

City pitching for drama

definition flexibility

Rethinking Canadian movies, Znaimer prides himself on not being one of those conventional broadcasters who ‘hate production.’ City has long been the sole private broadcaster investing its drama funds in Canadian feature films. It currently has 145 films under licence including Never Too Late, Hard Core Logo, Drive, She Said, Grass and Kitchen Party. Six features were prelicensed at over $250,000 each in 1997.

City prelicenses 12-18 Canadian feature films a year at a cost of $100,000-$300,000 and says it’s flexible, willing to buy in after pay-tv if the producer wishes, and also works at selling films to other broadcasters, including regional stations where the investment would have been otherwise too low to trigger existing funding mechanisms. And films are also sold to national networks like cbc.

On the agenda this year is the desire to begin producing Canadian urban-based drama in the form of 90-minute and two-hour mows. Znaimer says he wants to do it as the producer. Znaimer says as the system stands, only national networks are able to meet the drama threshold requirements and the current regime effectively stops him from producing and accessing funding. He says the rule changes introduced during the Pierre DesRoches era at Telefilm Canada have worked for companies like Alliance and Atlantis, and they are active in broadcasting.

Znaimer’s vision is to produce more drama on smaller budgets, adopting lighter production structures, even shooting on video. And if there is a concern the tv affiliates will simply take over, he says lay out a set of new rules obliging a third-party broadcast trigger (as opposed to a self-trigger) or limit the number of projects from any one applicant. ‘But why deny the players?’