Cable in context

The crtc’s action on Fairchild Television prompted a collective exhale from within the broadcasting ranks.

The new frontier may be the free-market cha-cha but evidently the commission will regulate when necessary. Fairchild, for example.

Where this plays out with Vision tv and tmn is still part of the drama in progress, but it’s only a piece of some bigger decisions the commission will make in the short term on the role of the cable companies in the Canadian television and production business.

From the broadcasting side, it’s somewhat straightforward. After the antics of the last two months, cable has lost the moral high ground. Gouging takes on new meaning if it turns out that Rogers has played the access card to leverage a piece of ownership in chum’s Pulse 24, but even if the politics of this particular situation aren’t as nasty as they appear, at the very least the capacity argument flies like a penguin after the launch of tier three.

What is required in the short term are mechanisms to ensure fair dealing, access and accountability while cable owns the bdu monopoly. Honesty from the cable partners would be nice, as would a shift to a more pro-Canadian sensibility, but these are difficult to regulate and there’s no point dreaming in Technicolor.

From the production perspective, however, cable participation issues get progressively convoluted. Take money, for example.

Its seems a bit of a fragile situation, this Canadian television industry. More than a dozen specialty channels with hefty Canadian programming commitments inject more money in the collective system, but allocate skinny licence fees. Private broadcasters are lobbying for increased flexibility with Canadian drama in the schedule, for infomercials to count as Cancon, and to have the promotions budgets for Canadian programming factored into their Canadian expenditures.

You’d have to be blindly optimistic to see contributions to production from the main and niche nets as a growth industry.

As for the ctcpf, the idea is that the private sector should eventually shoulder the burden via injections coming from new bdus. The telecos have yet to get a broadcasting licence. The cablecos can stall on any one of a number of level playing field issues for time immemorial, and Canadian dth providers are probably having a tough time meeting their overhead at this point, never mind increasing the production kitty.

Bottom line: pocket change for production from new service providers in the short term, which leads us back to the cablecos.

Four specialty applications are in process for Rogers. It is also widely expected to apply for a national version of cfmt-tv early next year. Expect in tandem via these processes more pitches to allow cable into the production business.

Increasing the cable power base has an ominous ring, but with no new money for production on the horizon and cable the single distribution base stepping up to grow the production pie, it may be difficult and/or counter-productive to unilaterally reject the effort.