Montreal: Radio-Canada and its partners and Bravo! and partner Astral Media are readying rival applications for a national French-language arts channel.

Opening day pitches are set for June 27 at crtc hearings in Montreal.

The applicants are looking at two broad considerations: on the upside, francophones are among the country’s most avid consumers of culture; on the downside, which ever applicant wins will face a distribution headache trying to estimate likely penetration rates and devise a business plan with a sellable price or subscriber fee.

Michele Fortin, vp television at Radio-Canada, says cbc’s board of directors has unanimously voted in support of its project, Tele des Arts (tda). The boards of equity partners La Sept/arte and Tele-Quebec have followed suit.

One of the motives behind the Bravo! (70%) and Astral (30%) application for RendezVous des Artistes (rva) is to ensure the crtc has ‘an alternative choice.’ rva’s promoters know the crtc rejected src’s Reseau des Arts application, which some said was elitist and the commission said was too costly.

Like the Bravo! house style, rva will ‘demythologize the high arts,’ says Paul Gratton, Bravo! station manager and vp/gm of Space: The Imagination Station.

‘This is probably the key difference between the two applications in that we want to create television – we want to have a visual sense and talk to the visually literate generation. Otherwise, quite frankly, it’ll become an old fogies’ channel,’ he says.

(Demographically, arts channels, including Bravo!, tend to skew older than conventional networks, and Fortin says the audience profile for src’s Sunday night cultural showcase Les Beaux Dimanches and Bravo! are basically identical.)

src, BCE Media and French cultural broadcaster La Sept/arte have reduced their equity in tda in order to bring in Tele-Quebec and tv and festival producer L’Equipe Spectra (Monteal International Jazz Festival, Les Franco Folies). The ownership structure now stands at: src, 37%; pubcaster Tele-Quebec, 25%; bce, 16%; La Sept/arte, 15%; and L’Equipe Spectra, 7%.

tda has proposed:

* $43.7 million over seven years for Canadian productions and acquisitions, not including the full reinvestment of profits, if any;

* 24% or $17 million of the program budget will go to original independent Canadian production, $14 million to Canadian catalogue buys, and about $12.8 million to original production from tda. Fortin says in all, 61% of the program budget will be spent on Canadian productions.

tda’s operating budget is in the $13-million range.

rva has proposed:

* investing 40% of the previous year’s revenues in Canadian programming, including in-house production by rva, or a dollar sum of ‘close to $30 million’ over the seven-year licence term;

* close to $2.8 million, or 5% of revenues, for a ‘selective’ program to produce art videos, and an additional $350,000 for French-track Bravo!fact-style production;

* $2.45 million for closed captioning and subtitling.

rva’s operating budget is estimated to be in the $7-million to $8-million range.

Programming styles

There are other fundamental differences.

tda intends to program long-play concerts, stage plays and ballets, with little expectation the shows will appeal to hordes of young viewers, although Fortin says special program slots will be geared specifically to young audiences.

Jean-Pierre Laurendeau, rva program director, says the service will be aimed at a wide, non-elitist tv audience. Thematic evenings on litertaure, theatre and film are planned, ‘but the touch and feel will be more accessible, in a language people understand. The packaging will give [rva] a tone that is younger and more accessible,’ he says.

Bravo! commissions about 100 hours a year of full-length programs, but Gratton says rva will not be an alternative to buying a ballet or opera show ticket.

The approach is likely to be more abbreviated, a more promotional ‘behind-the-scenes, making-of’ documentary style.

Gratton doesn’t preclude the production of full-length ballets, and says Bravo! and cbc have licensed a production of The Four Seasons, ‘but it has been remounted for television with pov camera movements and is not being taped off the stage.’

‘For the arts milieu, we’d like to have the same kind of effect MusiquePlus has had on the pop music scene,’ adds Laurendeau.

‘Fully 40% of Bravo!’s independent commissions have been with Quebec producers over the years,’ says Gratton. ‘So obviously having a French-language sister station in Montreal managed by Quebecers would allow for a certain facility in coproducing, or maintaining coproductions that are already going on anyway. I think all of the Quebec producers who engage in this stuff [arts programs] already have a relationship with us at Bravo!’

The TDA approach

Fortin says tda’s mission is ‘the promotion of culture in French.’

She makes it very clear src has no intention of dumping its cultural programming if tda is licensed. ‘When we started Reseau de l’Information we didn’t one day decide we weren’t going to do news. If we have a cultural network we’ll need our main network to support it. It’s a long-term commitment for the entire corporation, for us and for Tele-Quebec.’

As for the ‘elitist’ tag, Fortin says ‘people shouldn’t be underestimated’ because all sorts of individuals enjoy an extended Chopin concert or attending a play.

In programming terms, src and Tele-Quebec, often in association with TV5, already cofinance arts and performing arts production.

‘As for the Bravo! shows, which they say they license in Quebec most of the time, we [src] are the principal partners for those shows,’ says Fortin.

tda’s programming committee will consist of the consortium’s broadcast partners and BCE Media, which will produce all of the service’s Internet programming. ‘That permits us to share programs and ensure we don’t broadcast the same things on three different networks on the same night. But the authority will remain with the program director, who will report to the board of directors,’ says Fortin.

tda’s programming partners include France 2, Belgium’s rtbf and Switzerland’s tsr, a commitment representing some 50 hours annually. In addition, La Sept/arte, which could help sell tda programs to affiliate specialties like Histoire, Mezzo (musique) and Festival (drama), has agreed to invest $250,000 a year in coproductions with tda.

tda’s stakeholders have invested $11 million in the form of start-up capital. Fortin says it’s enough – based on a 40% to 60% penetration rate over three years – to cover all start-up and operating costs.

In pooling terms, Gratton makes the point that ‘very little of the material on Bravo! comes from MuchMusic or MuchMoreMusic …so we are not trying to amortize the cost of the other channels on to this one [rva].’

‘I think the private sector is particularly well-positioned to be fast on its feet when it comes to the realities of specialty channels,’ says Gratton. ‘We are two partners and we can move quickly, and we don’t have to get a committee together to discuss a crisis.’

Both rva and tda intend to schedule a limited number of international and Quebec movies and a daily cultural magazine.

The deadline for interventions is June 5.