Calgary, you might have tuned into the screaming match between Canadian television stations and Canadian cable companies. Amazingly, they are fighting over local TV. It is an oxymoron in this country.
Local used to mean locally owned. The joke of course is that local TV, outside of the major centres in this country, is such thin gruel you are hard pressed to wonder what would really go missing if they were to disappear. They have been squeezed like lemons for years and there isn't much left.
In Red Deer, a town of about 85,000 in Alberta, they closed the TV station and few seem to have noticed. Not the hockey team who thought attendance would be down or the co-op grocery store that used to advertise on it. Of course the disappearance of the station started long ago when 50 per cent of people in the viewing area switched to satellite and many others courtesy of the 100-plus channel universe of cable had other choices.
There are no heroes in this story. If you want the biased and misleading local television story you can go to www.localtvmatters.com and if
you want the biased and mis-leading cable story you can go to www.stopthetvtax.ca. All of this is primer for next year’s mid-term elections in the United States, which is pretty much what this advertising looks like.
The cynicism of both campaigns is a derivative of American political advertising, which is about as low as you can go.
These people should be ashamed of themselves, but they aren't. They cleverly tell their stories but neither party has much interest in pubic service. It's about money. That's it. The short story is this.
Yes, times are bad for local TV. The combination of the recession and the Internet tsunami is changing the landscape forever. They wouldn't be in such bad shape if CTV had spent a billion-plus dollars to buy CHUM TV a few years ago and if Canwest hadn't spent a couple of billion to buy Alliance Atlantis a few years ago. It's about debt, bad management and a recession.
The content producers pay about $750 million to buy American programming and the cable companies spend about $300 million to bring in American channels. The cable companies have no moral leg to stand on. They add little value, they are uncontrolled expensive monopolies (Rogers and Shaw have colluded for years not to compete). They are just lucky. They won a lottery and they don't want anyone to mess with it. What started out as a policy framework to try and encourage Canadian television programming through a myriad of offsets and compromises has ended in greedy, ill tempered, fighting between content producers and distributors.
It will be very interesting to see what the Tories do with this mess. They have little interest in Canadian content. They have however spent a lot of money avoiding national media whom they view as hostile to their policies by producing their own videos and sending them to local stations who are happy to play their stuff just to fill time. My guess is their need to control their political message will trump their distaste for the broadcasters. They will find a way to ingratiate themselves with the content producers.
The larger problem is, who will speak for Canada? Who will speak for Timmins or Kamloops? Not the cable companies. Not the content producers. We need to rethink our broadcasting rules of engagement. It isn't working and the consolidating money managers who are running these operations are the last ones to ask.
The Internet changes everything. It may open doors we haven't seen yet. For most Canadians it doesn't matter who wins this battle. If the content producers win, they will take their booty and keep open more stations than they would otherwise, but to little effect. If the cable companies successfully defend their extraordinarily profitable sinecures, well, nothing changes and the easy money keeps on rolling.
We need to look at this whole thing again. It doesn't work.
Michael Atkins
President of Laurentian Media Group
matkins@laurentianmedia.com
