Will dominant CTV and Canwest Global buy fewer U.S. series at lower prices at this year’s Los Angeles Screenings?

We’ll know soon enough.

The Canadians have renewed licensing arrangements for returning series. Now it’s on to the U.S. pilot previews which got underway Thursday on studio lots. The screenathon is formally scheduled to end Monday, but CTV and Canwest will jump the gun and wrap their screenings Saturday morning before they start horse-trading for new shows later that day.

That should have CTV and Canwest execs flying home Sunday morning with their unproven new U.S. shows in hand to begin selling their fall schedules to Canadian advertisers in early June.

‘This will be a condensed market. Everyone’s being fiscally responsible,’ Don Gaudet, general manager of programming at SunTV, said after screening at the Warner Bros. lot Thursday.

And as long as CTV and Canwest don’t pursue the same shows, prices they pay for new series are set to fall for the first time in years.

‘Whatever becomes the buzz show like 90210 last year, that will go for a premium. But the overall cost of programming will come down,’ Gaudet added.

How much product CTV and Canwest leave behind — as they shed A- and E!-branded stations — should determine what Rogers Media gets to bid on after the high-rollers leave the table. SunTV will be next.

But CTV and Canwest also come to this year’s screenings as diminished players.

Canwest secured an eleventh-hour injection of $175 million from its creditors going into this week’s U.S. TV market. So its studio suppliers — CBS Paramount International TV, Sony Pictures Television International and 20th Century Fox Television Distribution — now have confidence they can do deals this weekend and deliver programming in the fall to Global Television.

CTV, a risk-all buyer in Los Angeles in recent years, will return Saturday to traditional suppliers Warner Bros. International TV and Disney/ABC International Television. But the Canadian ratings-leader is expected to buy less product as it factors in returning franchises, fewer A channels, the continuing TV ad slump and eroding audiences for U.S. network series.