Private broadcasters are accused of dragging their feet to sign off on so-called ‘terms-of-trade’ agreements with independent producers.

The broadcasters counter that indie producers are conducting hard-nosed commercial negotiations when they envision a ‘best practices’ manual to govern their future business dealings.

And the CRTC is poised on the sidelines to help resolve, if required, what is fast turning into an industry bun fight.

So the terms-of-trade negotiations between Canadian producers and CTVglobemedia, Canwest Global and other domestic broadcasters grind on, with both sides increasingly at odds over process.

‘It has to be specific. It has to have some teeth, or it’s not worth doing,’ John Barrack, national VP and counsel for the CFTPA, representing major indie producers, says of current efforts to wrest favorable terms from the broadcasters on how to value program rights, including new media product.

But the broadcasters, pushed by the CRTC to reach a terms-of-trade agreement with the producers before their upcoming licence renewal hearings, insist the talks should not be run like a labor negotiation.

According to one well-placed broadcaster source in the bargaining: ‘We are slowly coming up with joint principles.’

The crunch issues include licensing for various digital platforms, and timeliness in agreeing on terms and rights for TV projects. And producers are eager to end requests by broadcasters for multi-platform exhibition rights for programming, which undermines the ability of program creators to hammer out separate licensing agreements for each broadcast window, where the licence fee is determined by the value of each exhibition window.

The terms-of-trade talks got off to an uneasy start, with the CFTPA, led by Hill and Knowlton Canada’s Gordon Ritchie, who negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement for Canada, insisting on separate talks with individual broadcasters.

The broadcasters insisted they would only negotiate collectively, to guard against one broadcaster reaching a more favorable agreement than its rivals.

At the same time, the CBC has been happy to bargain with the producers on their own, separate from CTV and Canwest.

‘We’re committed to Canadian programming. For the others, it’s the cost of doing business,’ says Richard Stursberg, CBC’s executive VP of English services.

In the end, the broadcasters got their wish for collective talks. The producers met with TVO in late October, have a session with Rogers Broadcasting, CTVgm and Canwest set for Nov. 17, and after that will resume talks with the CBC.

The CRTC insists it wants to see a draft, if not signed, terms-of-trade agreement as part of upcoming licence-renewal applications.

The broadcasters doubt that those documents will be ready in time for the licence-renewal hearings, expected next spring.

But the producers, seeing the hearings as a pressure point to force an agreement, are betting the CRTC will intervene to knock heads together.

Whether the CRTC does step in would have ramifications elsewhere in the industry. For example, the broadcasters are set to negotiate with cable and satellite TV operators for compensation of lost ad revenue from so-called distant signals.

Here again, the CRTC has threatened to impose an unspecified dispute-resolution mechanism on the distant-signal negotiations, if they come unstuck.

While the CFTPA is stick-handling talks with English-language TV networks, the APFTQ, representing Quebec producers, is conducting separate negotiations with the French-language networks TVA and TQS, TV5 and the Astral specialty channels, and Radio-Canada and Télé-Québec.