With two months until the 1998/99 nfl season kicks off, still no official word from the crtc on complaints filed by ExpressVu against Rogers Cablesystems and its pay-per-view football deal.

The commission is currently receiving ‘a lot of correspondence’ between Rogers and ExpressVu, says crtc spokesperson Diane Nault, but none of it is public information right now. The crtc will render a decision at a yet-to-be-determined time.

The turf war being waged centers on Rogers’ acquisition of exclusive ppv rights to the NFL Sunday Ticket, which premiers Sunday, Sept. 6. Sunday Ticket is a full schedule of up to 13 nfl games every Sunday afternoon, or nearly 200 regular season games. (All Fox and nbc Sunday afternoon regular season games will be included in the package, except where local blackout restrictions apply. Some nfl games on Global and cfmt-tv will continue to be available over the air.)

ExpressVu is crying foul because ‘the actual package was not made available to dth companies,’ says Paula Thompson, director of communications at ExpressVu.

‘As a new company, we want access to the same programming, and obviously commercial agreements aside, a deal is a deal, but we want to be able to play in the game.’

Phil Lind, vice chairman of Rogers Communications, says he is ‘mystified by all this. I don’t understand what the issue is. The owner of the property [the nfl] has made a business decision to distribute it in a fashion that doesn’t interfere with their major business unit in the United States. So they picked cable, and we bought the rights. It’s as simple as that.’

Lind explains that the nfl selected Directtv, the dth satellite broadcast service, as the Sunday Ticket’s u.s. carrier.

‘In Canada,’ he continues, ‘the nfl surveyed the environment and decided the preferred way of distribution in this country would be cable. They can’t give it to another satellite company in Canada because the signal would go to the States. If they [ExpressVu] have to talk to anybody, they should talk to the nfl.’

Along with Rogers, Mountain Cablevision, Cogeco Cable Systems, Western Co-Axial, Cable Regina and Southmount Cable will carry the package, while Viewer’s Choice will offer it across Canada.