Politics will not stand in the way of direct-to-home satellite service Expressvu meeting its Sept. 1 launch date, says Expressvu president Ted Boyle.

Expressvu threw down the gauntlet last Thursday in response to the latest political wrestling over licensing direct-to-home satellite services, which has left industry players frustrated and at the mercy of the political process.

‘A delay in the launch could cause contracts to slip or be changed. We have regulatory and legal opinions to support us, and we’re going up,’ says Boyle.

How the government will react to Expressvu’s position is uncertain, but Joel Bell, president of Power DirecTv, says it may drive home the need for the crtc to speed up the licensing process and give both providers the ability to beam down at the same time.

‘It is certainly within the power of the crtc to put us in the position to operate Sept. 1, and that’s what should happen.’

If left to the political agenda in process, it’s likely to take a minimum of six months before either Expressvu or Power DirecTv has a licence.

Engaging a section of the Broadcasting Act not used since it was passed by the Mulroney government in 1993, Heritage Minister Michel Dupuy tabled an order in Parliament at the end of April ordering the crtc to begin the licensing process for dth services, after the commission rejected a government directive to do so.

Right now, the minister’s order sits in front of the House for 40 sitting days, until about June 26, at which point the government will issue an order back to the crtc.

According to Lise Plousse, senior communications officer with the crtc, the commission will subsequently put out the call for applications, which will take at least one month. Then, the applications go through a ‘completion process,’ in which the crtc verifies that all necessary information has been supplied, taking another one or two months.

Then, a public hearing will be announced. By law, there must be 50 days between the announcement and the hearing to let interested parties file their submissions and petition for standing, says Plousse. This takes us well into October before the actual hearings begin, which will take a minimum of a month. Decisions on applications don’t usually come down for at least a couple of months after the hearings, Plousse concludes.

In the short term, the ministers of Heritage and Industry will be accepting public submissions on the dth issue until June 2. To date, the government has 468 public submissions in hand.

Expressvu and Power DirecTv will begin approaching broadcasters soon, so if the licensing process is carried out exponentially, they’ll be ready.

In the meantime, Power DirecTv’s u.s. sister company, DirecTv, has filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission to prevent Milton, Ont.-based Tee-Comm Electronics (a one-third partner in Expressvu) from launching in the u.s., claiming it is unfair to allow Tee-Comm to exploit the u.s. market while the crtc continues to bar DirecTv from the Canadian market.