Applicants looking to launch Canada’s next pay-TV channels had apparently not finished their homework by the time they arrived in Ottawa to plead their cases to the CRTC. Except for one, the Canadian Film Channel, none of the bidders had their programming grids completely ready.

The other bidders – Spotlight Entertainment, Allarco Entertainment and Groupe Archambault – were given two extra days to get caught up.

‘I was quite shocked that applicants would show up at a hearing without having even a sample programming grid,’ says John Riley, president of Astral Television Networks. ‘I think the commission was surprised, too.’

Astral owns The Movie Network and, together with Corus Entertainment’s Movie Central, is looking to protect its duopoly on the pay-TV market.

George Burger, president and CEO of Spotlight, insists his application was complete, but ‘because it is an important issue… the commission wanted a [clearer] illustration of what it was that we were planning to show in terms of titles,’ he says.

Cal Millar, president of CFC, says the four-day hearings in October were ‘grueling’ but positive. The proposed all-Canadian channel recently amended its application, pledging to partially fund projects with budgets of up to $1.5 million, up from its previous limit of $500,000.

‘Like anything when you’re presenting, afterwards you say to yourself, ‘Oh, I should have said this’ or ‘I should have said that,’ but in truth I think we made the points we needed to make,’ he says.

Neither Allarco nor Archambault returned calls for comment.

At the hearings, Astral and Corus repeated their arguments that new services would create duplication in the industry, taking money away from Canadian producers.

‘We said that all of the programming that people desire was already on Movie Central and TMN,’ says Paul Robertson, president of television at Corus. ‘We pointed to the fact that we had 90% of the top 200 [movies] from Variety and we said we’ve got virtually all of the original series from Showtime and HBO.’

Riley says he saw nothing new in the applicants’ presentations to indicate they would increase programming diversity or benefit producers.

‘If you split the market so that there are [more than] two services splitting the content we already have, then you’re not going to have as many subscribers and your revenues go down,’ he says. ‘And when revenues go down the contribution to Canadian producers goes down.’

Burger dismisses that argument as ‘cynical’ and says the backing of many big-name prodcos proves the incumbents are wrong, pointing to appearances at the hearings by Christopher Zimmer from imX communications and Michael Prupas of Muse Entertainment. ‘We have everybody from across the country unequivocally understanding that new money [from the new services] is good.’

CFC says it will not compete directly with the existing services, but was questioned by commissioners about whether it would ghettoize Canadian content.

‘In reality, the majority of people who have responded have said, ‘No, it’s a celebration of Canadian [film] and it’s an opportunity to get more films seen by more Canadians,” says Millar.

The CRTC is expected to hand down its decision within the next eight to 10 months.

www.crtc.gc.ca