Wow. Just wow. It look me like 5 scrolls on my mouse to get through that damn list. I think they may air more American programming than American networks!

Karl Peladeau recently stated that consumers should be able to choose the channels that they want. That is a great place to start. If the CRTC would de-regulate on basic cable packages, the entire debate would be moot.

All My Children
30 Rock
Jimmy Kimmel
America's Got Talent
Kilmora: Life in the Fab Lane
America's Toughest Jobs
Cold Case
Grey's Anatomy
Supernanny
Eli Stone
Parks and Recreation
Gossip Girl
Battlestar Galactica
Dirty Sexy Money
High School Musical
Fringe
The Simpsons
Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien
Jimmy Fallon
60 Minutes
Mad Men
Missing
One Life to Live
America's Next Top Model
Private Practice
Pushing Daisies
Samantha Who?
Supernanny
Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles
The Big Bang Theory
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
The Mentalist
The Jay Leno Show
TMZ
TMZ Weekend
Two and a Half Men
Whose Line is it Anyways
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
Wife Swap
Live with Regis and Kelly
The View
The NFL
The PGA
America's Funniest Home Videos
Bold and the Beatiful
Oprah
General Hospital
Dr. Phil
Access Hollywood
The Amazing Race
Law and Order
Law and Order: CI
Law and Order: SVU
CSI
CSI: New York
CSI: Miami
Don't Forget the Lyrics
NCIS
NCIS: Los Angeles
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
So You Think You Can Dance
American Idol
Ghost Whisperer
Hole in the Wall
Numbers
Prison Break
Heroes
My Own Worst Enemy
House
90210
Kitchen Nightmares
Bones
Survivor
The Office
Kath and Kim
Life on Mars
Life
The Ex-List
King of the Hill
Family Guy
American Dad
Brothers and Sisters
'Til Death
How I Met Your Mother
Do Not Disturb
Worst Week
Boston Legal
Knight Rider
Deal or No Deal
E! Ture Hollywood Story
My Name is Earl
Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?
Dateline NBC
Eleventh Hour
20/20
Snoop Dogg's Father Hood
Forbes Specials
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
The Real Housewives of Orange County
Cougar Town
Modern Family
Curb Your Enthusiasm
The Biggest Loser
Judge Judy

I knew it was bad, but I didn't think it was this bad. This list is longer than my grocery list for a full year.

Realistically, nobody will force the networks to run American programming commercial free. American shows run about 21 minutes per half hour and they are bought so the gap time is the place to finance it. Personally, since the Canadian broadcasters claim to want a model similar to the US, I'd tell them to replicate it completely. Let each network only be allowed to own an affiliate in the two or three largest cities in the country and dump their licenses for everything else. Then, like the US, they have to dedicate at least 90 percent of their primetime programming to domestic shows. And simultaneous signal substitution is history (if CTV wants to show "Dancing with the Stars", either make a Canadian version or run it at 2 in the afternoon. If they don't like it, tell 'em to buy every Canadian a PVR if they're so worried about ratings decline.) After all that......give them their fee for carriage. It says here that they'd run and say they'll manage just fine thank you.

Without getting into the whole stealing aspect of the conversation,

Let’s.
How is picking up a signal on rabbit ears and videotaping it to watch it later any different from downloading it and watching it later???
To hear some, it would seem the former is kinda okayish, whilst the second if bringing the whole universe on it’s knees and has to be absolutely eradicated, civil liberties be dammned!!!

On the other hand, I think it's companies like Roku that are truly innovating and that are the future for that market of people. For example, their recent announcement of the Roku Channel Store: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/11/23/roku-channel-store-launches-with-10-new-channels-available/

Well, either they are getting too greedy (like 99.99999% of the businesses out there), or they do not charge enough for their commercials (a variation of the point above).

And if they want to air US TV programmes, they should be allowed to air as much as they want. However, they should not be allowed to have commercials while they air them.

This way, they’ll get back into producing “canadian” programmes (oh, those will suck, compared to US programmes, yes, but hey! that’s what happen when you live next to a 900 pound gorilla).

Or they’ll shut down, and leave their market to someone else who can live with that.

The next great innovative local channel or network (mini-network?) is going to come from an individual or family-run operation and it will start via internet streaming. The cost of getting network broadcast bandwidth (if you can even get it) combined with Global and CTV stockpiling every American show around makes even a start-up cost prohibitive if not impossible. Just a gut feeling.

I'd love the CRTC to do nothing. CTV will file for bankruptcy if they don't extract a penny out of this and Global is already in a restructuring mode that practically hinders on getting an extra handout (serves Izzy's boys right for selling their souls to Goldman Sachs). And, yes, these monoliths certainly CAN use their specialty profits to subsidize their deadweight. I seem to recall it was just a couple of years ago when CTV overpaid the Waters family to get the CHUM assets - a deal they wanted so badly that, to get the CRTC onside, they switched their side deal with Rogers and sold off the CITY stations instead of the A channel stations (in other words, fully accepting a less lucrative OTA parcel because they so badly wanted the other assets.)

Without getting into the whole stealing aspect of the conversation, you have to concede that conventional television viewers, with their subscriptions fees and--yes, advertising--make that episode of Battlestar or Lost you just downloaded possible. They basically paid for it, with sufficient enough a profit to make production companies and distributors willing to put it out there.

So, in summary, thank your lucky stars there STILL ARE people watching television.

Yes, CTV, CBC/SRC, Global and the rest of them complained about a lack of fee for carriage. But, this was not the only voice in the matter. The Corus group mentioned that their Over-the-Air (OTA) stations where doing fine. They have three stations. One of them is in Kingston,ON. This caught the CRTC by surprise. The Corus group mentioned something about being focused on local needs of advertisers, and the local audience. So, just goes to show you that what CTV and friends are complaining about is not universal. Just their way of operating their stations.

CTV and friends are centrally run business out of Toronto. They have no idea what their local markets need. And so, they focus on a across the board network programming. This attitude has destroyed the local TV stations they own. The french media does the same only they do it with Montreal. I don't believe any of these stations will recover until the CRTC forces them to be limited to owning 40% of all the stations in their network. Just like the FCC puts limits on US networks owning no more than about 40% of their affliliates. And also to imposing what when the networks can provide network programming. Example, the US networks prime time is 8pm-11pm. The hours just before are local, so that the local stations can provide local news, and earn money from syndicated programs etc. The CRTC should force CTV, and Global, plus all Canadian networks to do the same. 4pm - 8pm should be local. 8pm-11pm is network with 50% of the shows being original Canadian shows. 11pm-midnight local. The only exemption would be a 30min network news in either the 4pm-8pm slot or the 11pm-midnight slot. This will allow local stations to operate much as the local US stations do. And, anybody that watches local US stations can see the amount of local news, those stations do.

CTV and friends have been allowed to own all of their stations. The day this happened, they no longer operated as networks with local affiliates. It is at this point that local newsrooms, and local master controls where shut down. The CRTC needs to look at this as a way to correct the problem.

Also, for those interested on the CRTC hearings, they can follow them at the CPAC site. I believe you can even see last weeks meetings on their site as well.

As for this site, please keep up the good work on covering this subject matter.

The CTV Montreal website's video player clearly has the news block online as one item, along with individual stories.

The block only shows the first 11 minutes of the newscast, up until the first commercial break.

Google leverages its monopoly on search (and therefore relevant ad placement which actually makes the money) to build high quality products in tangential sectors that drive more traffic and more money to Google. Emphasis on high quality. More on this later. Convergence still works, but big media seems to have forgotten why it works in the first place. They're completely focused on economies of scale, driving quality way down, rather than what convergence should really be about: driving people to your profitable sectors. Their current strategy will simply make it easier for new entrants to beat them on both cost *AND* quality.

Local TV, I believe, still has major profit potential. It's possibly the only traditional media sector outside specialty channels that does, simply because they still have leverage there. But they're losing it.

Google actually is their enemy, but not just yet which is why they still haven't clued in. Large companies can rarely see past the next quarter, which is why companies with a long term plan such as Google and Apple trounce them regularly whenever they enter a new market. A very likely scenario I see panning out is that big media continues their race to the bottom, cutting costs anywhere and everywhere, driving quality terribly down. This drive to cut costs suddenly makes it economical for independents to start up and start reporting on their local situation. Imagine Spacing Montreal TV for example. It'll be an online podcast you can stream and subscribe to on any mobile device (in a few years most new mobiles will be internet-enabled) or internet-enabled TV (some are already coming out and expect a lot more in the future).

In the meantime, Google's been working on Android. The real reason Google develops the Android mobile phone OS and licences it to any company that wants it for free is that they end up with expertise in and hopefully, eventually, a near monopoly on localized search. And Android isn't a bare-minimum effort to do just enough as necessary. Android is very young (only just this month have decent hardware phones started coming out with Android (in the US obviously, Canada is a mobile backwater but that's a topic for another time)) and already it's trouncing Windows Mobile and Symbian. It's a high quality product that Google invests a lot in and doesn't return a dime. And yet, because it's driving so many more phones to have decent browsers and decent web accessibility (Windows Mobile's web browsing is bad, RIM's is terrible and Symbian is excruciating), Google is poised to make a lot more revenue off their loss leader. It isn't a big leap to imagine Spacing Montreal TV teaming up with Google's now-location-aware adsense network and using them for advertising.

Local advertising is the last cash cow Google hasn't grabbed yet. And big media is going their best to ignore it.

Finally, the reason why local advertising could be, but isn't yet, a cash cow is because if a local restaurant wants to promote its new launch it has to deal with the marketing and advertising departments of everywhere it wants to advertise along with dealing with all the bureaucracy that entails. It's too expensive. An automated self-serve tool such as adsense local that will broadcast on all "Google Local News" affiliates (or just those you pick, or just based on certain types of content and lots of other customizations big media doesn't allow you) brings the costs of advertising way down but Google makes even more profit and this is where Google wins again.

I don't know anyone my age that watches the news. I know lots that follow local blogs however. And that's actually quite surprising because on the whole, we're a pretty lazy bunch. Even so, we'd rather manually fish out the best sources of information than deal with the spoon-fed, incredibly dumbed down, unoriginal and boring easy way out of just flipping on the TV. If there were an online "channel" catering to different types of local news (local tech news that you don't yell at every time they "explain" the tech, local community news, etc), a large majority of us would tune in.

I think the future of local news is actually pretty good in the long term but in the short term we're going to hit a rough patch when big media goes into its death throes and, being so large, tries to capture the government to keep it alive (pretty much what's happening now) when really, we'd be better off with a quicker death and a gaping void that entrepreneurs would rush into and innovate in very quickly.

Not entirely true. The CTV Montreal website's video player clearly has the news block online as one item, along with individual stories.

The archival section is non-existent, but that's what Google is for.