Satellite-TV distributor willing to help broadcasters switch to digital
Barbara Shecter
Sun
GATINEAU, Que. — Executives from satellite-TV distributor Bell ExpressVu say they are prepared to give their service away for free to viewers to help broadcasters such as CTV and Global defray the hundreds of millions of dollars it will cost to make a mandatory switch from analogue to digital signals.
But there’s a big caveat.
The plan to offer “Freesat,” a limited package of channels to anyone who buys ExpressVu satellite receiver equipment when analogue is “switched off” in 2011, could be taken off the table if the broadcasters are successful in a bid to extract millions of dollars from distributors in new fees for carriage.
“If our business gets impacted by fee for carriage . . . we may not be able to help the industry [with] the Freesat,” Gary Smith, president of the Bell Video Group, said during a presentation to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Wednesday.
The CRTC is holding three weeks of hearings in Gatineau, Que., — just across the river from Ottawa — to overhaul the rules governing TV carriage and distribution in Canada for the first time in 15 years. Broadcasters are asking the federal broadcast regulator to mandate fees from distributors of 50 to 70 cents per channel, noting that they operate the only channels in the system that are not directly compensated for providing content.
But Bell ExpressVu and other TV distributors strongly oppose the fees, with one Bell executive accusing the broadcasters of “crying wolf” about the declining state of their business and the challenge of meeting obligations to fund and broadcast Canadian news and entertainment. “Anytime there’s a shock to the system, fee for carriage? That can’t be the solution,” Mirko Bibic, Bell Canada‘s chief of regulatory affairs, told CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein and a panel of commissioners.
ExpressVu’s “Freesat” proposal would help broadcasters’ bottom line without fees for carriage, said Smith, because it would eliminate the need to build expensive towers that would otherwise be necessary to reach a small percentage of TV viewers who will be blacked out in the digital era because they don’t subscribe to satellite or cable.
Broadcasters have estimated the cost of building new towers to convert their signals to digital from the current analogue system at as little as $50 million for a network such as Citytv to as much as $200 million for CTV, Canada‘s largest private network. ExpressVu would charge broadcasters a fee to operate Freesat, but it would be less than the “huge expense” required to build a network of towers, said Smith.
However, Paul Sparkes, CTV’s executive vice-president of corporate affairs, at CTV, lashed out at the Freesat proposal.
