CRTC Bonanza: Part 1 - Who's Who?!

So it’s been a while since my last Canadian TV Beat post. I’m sorry for that.

My dad said I should look into what’s going on in the CRTC hearings and that took way longer than I had anticipated. In fact, I thought I had it figured out as I sat down to write, but then I spent 45 minutes discussing it even further with the old man to really understand who the players are, what they want, and what the ramifications will be for the consumers.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple weeks trying to wade through all the information slash bullshit that’s been all over the airways and internet. You know what I’m talking about… all the “Stop the TV Tax” vs. “Local TV Matters” campaigning that has been going on. To be honest, I’d been so confused by all of it that I just tuned it out. But once my dad forced challenged me to pay attention again, and I did a little research, I found it was pretty interesting stuff.

I’m not going to lie to you, this issue is pretty complex and there are so many different aspects to it that I didn’t even know what to start. So first things first, I looked into who the major players are.

We’re looking at a battle between the broadcasters and the cable and satellite providers. I had never really put much thought in two the fact that two groups are different entities. I’ve always been more of a content-focused kind of girl, so I didn’t know who did what, and I certainly didn’t know how the CRTC mattered (that’s the Canadian Radio-television Transmission Commission, just in case I wasn’t the only one in the dark).

There’s a lot of information out there, so here’s the long and the short of it.

WHO’S WHO:

The CRTC is an independent public authority that is in charge of regulating and supervising Canadian broadcasting and telecommunications. The CRTC is the middle guy in this battle, the arbitrator if you will and its main purpose is to ensure that both the broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public

The broadcasters are guys like Global, CBC, and CTV and their campaign is “Local TV Matters”. Broadcasters’ jobs are two-fold: They create content like TV shows and newscasts for their channels and they also broadcast that content (along with rights to broadcast content purchased from American networks) over-the-air to our TV’s. Typically these are the lower channels on our dials and the ones you can get even if you don’t have cable… I became pretty familiar with those six or so channels during my last year in university. The broadcasters are also required to follow the CRTC regulations for Canadian content.

The cable and satellite providers are guys like Rogers, Bell, and Cogeco, and mounted the “Stop the TV Tax” campaign. They provide us with our cable packages and our monthly cable bill for their service. The providers carry the signal from networks in the United-States (and across the world) for a fee, and create the infrastructure required for us to receive the signals via our cable boxes (or PVR… I love my PVR!).

Now you have a pretty good idea of who the players are and what the basic function is each group plays in your couch-sitting-television-watching escapism experience. I found that to be my biggest problem, not really knowing who did what. Hopefully now you can move forward in understanding the entire issue, because kids, this is just the beginning.

Check back tomorrow – I’m going to get into why each side launched these campaigns and what it is that they want, because from there it’s a clear path to understanding what it will mean for us.