Bill Roberts is president and CEO of Vision TV.

There’s a good deal at stake in the current debate over specialty channel ownership – not just for cable companies, broadcasters and viewers, but for Canada’s production community as well.

As Playback readers are well aware, the CRTC is now in the process of reviewing its policy restricting the ownership of specialty channels by cable operators.

The cable industry, understandably, wants to see such restrictions relaxed. Among its supporters on this issue are the federal Competition Bureau and the CFTPA – although both have also stressed the need for safeguards to ensure fair dealing.

Part of the whole rationale for the ongoing consolidation of ownership in the communications business is to create opportunities for the TV channels or daily newspapers owned by a combined company to cross-promote one another, as well as the corporate parent’s other products, such as cable or Internet services.

This has obvious benefits for any broadcaster that’s part of such an entity. But it puts some important non-aligned players – namely, the independent public service and not-for-profit channels – at a disadvantage.

This kind of imbalance could have profound implications for Canadian production. As the CFTPA pointed out to the CRTC recently, increased consolidation within the U.S. media industry has left fewer opportunities for independent producers south of the border to bring their offerings to market. The result has been the steady decline of a once-thriving independent production sector.

A 1999 McKinsey & Company report for the BBC affirmed that public service broadcasters can be crucial to helping a country maintain a strong domestic production base.

Consider the example of Vision TV: from 1994 to 2000, this channel – a small, not-for-profit service – spent approximately 55% of its overall revenues on Canadian programming. As figures recently released by the CRTC show, that’s a significantly higher percentage than is spent by the much larger commercial networks, CTV and Global. In all, fully one-third of Vision’s program spending over that period – roughly $13 million – went to independent production, triggering an additional $3.5 million in support from the Canadian Television Fund.

So how do we ensure the continued viability of public service channels like Vision? In its recent submission to the CRTC, the Competition Bureau recommended the regulator adopt the same approach taken by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which allows cable operators to hold a majority interest in specialty channels while capping the overall number of analog channels they and their affiliates can own.

This would certainly address the need for integration and consolidation within the Canadian communications business. But if the commission chooses to follow the FCC’s lead on this, then it should also consider adopting its U.S. counterpart’s model for preserving diversity on the airwaves.

Along with relaxing restrictions on the ownership of specialties, the FCC has retained its policy setting aside ‘green space’ for public service broadcasters. Currently, more than 20% of the analog spectrum in many U.S. states – as well as some 4% to 7% of the digital spectrum – is reserved for such channels.

Here in Canada, the CRTC could create ‘green space’ for unaffiliated public service, not-for-profit and educational broadcasters by: (a) instituting mandatory basic carriage for them on both analog and digital, (b) ensuring that they have prominent placement on the dial and (c) establishing a ‘foundation tier’ for such channels as part of the basic subscriber package offered by all distributors.

The ‘foundation tier’ could include CBC, Newsworld, CPAC, APTN, RDI, TV-5 and Vision, along with provincial public broadcasters and possibly even niche services like Bravo! and Reseau des arts that make unique contributions to Canadian culture.

Taking these to ensure the continued health of public-service broadcasters should benefit the entire independent production community. In recent years. Without the support that Vision and its counterparts provide in the form of licence fees, a great many films simply wouldn’t get made.

Public service broadcasters, it should be noted, also take risks on the sort of productions that commercial networks rarely touch – films devoted to such topics as human rights, social justice and Third World development. Much of this work comes from small, up-and-coming producers, a sizable number of whom are first-time filmmakers. In this way, channels like Vision make an essential contribution to the growth and development of new talent within the production sector. Who will fill this role if they cannot? *

-www.visiontv.ca