The whole specialty channel application, intervention and licensing process is inherently war-like and gory. Applicants don their armor, proclaim the unassailable valor of their purpose, and then zealously aim their Uzis at anyone who might be a competitor, or cast even the hint of a shadow of a competitor, creeping across the dmz.

The crtc sends out the call for applications and the respondents begin feathering their machine-gun nests.

One former director of television at the crtc once recalled that when asking former colleagues about how they decided which specialties to license, her question was not ‘Which did you license?’ but rather ‘How deep was the blood on the floor?’

As another round of licensing proceeds Aug. 14 when the crtc hears some of the 452 digi-specialty applicants, spewing blood threatens to flood the floor. One of the key concepts spurring gashing and sniping is channel nesting. Some existing channel owners think they should have exclusive rights to nest; that is, to launch a spin-off channel in a genre in which they already have a dominant position, as ctv has with comedy or chum has with music. These owners want desperately to prevent others from fragmenting the niche, even if the parent service is proposing a spin-off of its own.

This attitude is anti-competitive, it’s anti-diversity, and it discriminates in favor of central Canadian specialtycasting powerhouses and against smaller players who want to join the club.

This point of view, is, however, endorsed by the specialties’ association, sptv, which argues that nested services ‘share programming and infrastructure with parent services to lower operating costs, thereby allowing more resources for Canadian programming.’ sptv contends nested services do not compete directly with their parents.

Robert Armstrong, a former director of policy, planning and research at Telefilm Canada and director-general, television at the crtc, recently noted in Playback that most specialties follow a sure, rapid path to above-average profitability, even in cases where the crtc has licensed two similar services, such as Newsnet after Newsworld. Asks Armstrong: ‘What public interest is served by protecting the privileges of a few with the non-duplication rule?’

Is protecting the few the truest way to secure diversity of voices when edgy, entertaining, interactive tv services can be built outside the Toronto-Montreal nexus?

As one smaller applicant concludes in our special report (beginning p. 13), existing owners are ‘trying to maintain a status quo in an era where the status quo is passe.’

Ladies and gentlemen of the commission, we respectfully submit, it’s time to leave the nest.