There’s been a lot of uproar since Bell Media applied to the CRTC seeking rather drastic relief on its conditions of licence for conventional television stations. But it would be a mistake to think this is just a Bell thing. Just about every major TV broadcaster, including the CBC, has recently asked the commission to give some relief or flexibility. Some of those requests are reasonable, even logical. Others are exceptional. But all of them have the same underlying purpose: finding ways to save money because of economic forces that are pushing people away from traditional television.
Here’s what they’re asking for.
Definitions
First, to understand these requests, let’s explain what some of these terms mean.
- Local programming: Programming produced for a local station referring directly to the community and produced by the local station’s personnel or independent local producers. According to CRTC policy, English-language commercial TV stations are required to broadcast at least 14 hours a week in the five metropolitan markets (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton) and 7 hours a week in other markets, unless they have an exception through a condition of licence. French-language TV stations have case-by-case quotas, but with a guideline of five hours a week for stations outside Montreal. This programming does not have to specifically be news or current affairs, though most stations choose to meet this quota through newscasts or local morning shows. The quota can be met through repeats, which is why you often see the evening news repeated at 6am.
- Locally reflective news: When the CRTC renewed licences for the large TV broadcasters in 2017, it imposed new quotas on “locally reflective news”. It includes news that “relates specifically to the market a station is licensed to serve” and “portrays an onscreen image of the market” and “is produced by the station’s staff or by independent producers specifically for the station.” The quotas are both in terms of time (6 hours for the five metropolitan markets, 3 hours otherwise for English stations) and spending (11% of the group’s gross revenues for English stations and 5% for French stations).
- CPE (Canadian programming expenditures): TV broadcasters are required to spend a certain amount of their revenues on certified Canadian programming. (This can include things like news.) Generally, it’s 30% of revenues for English stations, and for French stations it varies but somewhere between 25% and 45%. The large broadcasting groups can pool their resources (except their news and sports channels) to meet this requirement, so they can spend more on, say, lifestyle shows on HGTV or CTV Life and less on other channels so long as the group spends 30% of its total revenues on Canadian programming.
- PNI (programs of national interest): In order to encourage broadcasters to not spend all their CPE funding on game shows and reality TV, a new requirement was placed requiring a certain amount of spending on what the CRTC calls “programs of national interest”, defined as including scripted drama, scripted comedy, long-form documentary and awards shows (from a list of those eligible). The amount varies by group based on what they historically spent on this, but is generally in the range of 5-10%.
Bell Media
What they want:
- Eliminate local programming quota for all stations (CTV, CTV2 and Noovo)
- Eliminate locally reflective news quotas (both airtime and spending) for those stations
- Reduce CPE quota to 20% from 30%
- Reduce PNI quota to 5% from 7.5%
- Expand PNI categories to include music programs, music videos, variety and game shows and reality TV
- In exchange for the above, require 100% of PNI expenditures go to an independent production company (up from 75% currently)
What they say: “The Canadian broadcasting industry is in crisis due in large part to a virtually unlimited array of foreign-owned digital media broadcasting undertakings (DMBUs) being present in the Canadian market for several years without any regulatory obligations. In addition, the growth of the Internet and digital advertising has siphoned billions of dollars in revenue away from traditional broadcasters; viewing to traditional television broadcasters has fallen; and broadcasting distribution undertakings (BDUs) are grappling with a corresponding drop in television subscribers.”
For more details on Bell’s application, see this post.
Application status: Comments are being accepted until July 24.
Corus
What they want:
- Reduce PNI quota to 5% from 8.5%
- Reduce CPE quota to 25% from 30%
- Discontinue a requirement to direct 0.17% of revenues to the music recording assistance funds
- Gain access to the Independent Local News Fund
What they say: The decision to administratively renew the licences beyond their term “ensures obligations that were based on now outdated market realities, and intended to be temporary, will remain in effect for at least two more years. It ensures we will continue to carry hundreds of millions of dollars in annual regulatory obligations without a formal opportunity to weigh in on their appropriateness.”
Analysis: Like Bell, Corus wants to reduce the big-budget items of CPE and PNI quotas. For PNI, the 5% represents what the CRTC had originally set it at in 2017, before the federal government stepped in and asked the commission to reconsider its decisions and impose higher quotas, which it did. This application therefore seeks to reconsider that quota again and essentially go against what the government wanted at the time.
The music requirement comes from the fact that Bell, Corus and Rogers no longer have music video channels — MuchMusic, CMT and others still exist but no longer broadcast music and therefore no longer pay music royalties to help fund that industry. In the decision instituting such a quota, the CRTC said it “considers that an expenditure requirement imposed on television licensees should constitute a temporary measure, until the end of their current licence term, to allow the music industry to adapt.” Since this requirement was supposed to expire anyway, it seems plausible the commission could agree to eliminate it now even if it doesn’t agree to lower other quotas.
Corus also notes that since the last licence renewal, it has shut down Sundance, Cosmopolitan TV, FYI, IFC Canada and BBC Canada, meaning their discretionary channel mix weighs more heavily toward lifestyle and reality TV channels like HGTV and Food Network and less toward scripted programming.
Application status: The comment period ended June 14. The CRTC received 11 interventions, all from within the industry.
Rogers
What they want:
- Allow Citytv and other Rogers channels to include the following categories toward their PNI quota: analysis and interpretation, music and dance other than music video programs or clips, variety, game shows, general entertainment and human interest, and reality television.
- In exchange, require 100% of PNI funding go to independent producers, up from 75%
What they say: “The requirement to devote 5% of our annual gross revenues to expenditures solely on PNI has become unduly restrictive, and forces Rogers to fund programming that is not in keeping with its programming strategy; this in turn has a negative impact on our ability to finance expensive news and information programming.”
Analysis: Compared to Corus and Bell, Rogers’s requests are more moderate. And it targets one program in particular: Canada’s Got Talent.
“It is a unique forum in which aspiring Canadian talent from a wide range of artistic disciplines have an opportunity to perform in front of a national audience,” Rogers writes in its application. “It celebrates and showcases Canadian creative talent in all regions of the country and promotes Canadian achievements in the cultural, media and arts sectors. The contestants are artists with minimal professional success who are looking to increase their exposure and discoverability, and the show provides exposure to national audiences and the subsequent career-enhancing opportunities that brings.”
Rogers thinks so highly of CGT that it should be put on the same level as original dramas and documentaries. That’s an arguable point. Rogers definitely puts some money into the show, and it does support Canadian talent. But Canadian writers and actors don’t make money from CGT, and will have something to say about that. And Rogers is asking for a lot of other program categories to be included when it could have just carved out an exception for a competition series involving Canadian performance talent.
Application status: Comments are being accepted until July 19. You can download the application (276 kB .zip file) here or file a comment here.
Quebecor (TVA)
What they want:
- Eliminate 5% locally reflective news quota and all requirements for locally reflective news at its stations (6 hours per week at CFTM-DT Montreal, 3 hours and 30 minutes per week at CFCM-DT Quebec City, and 2 hours and 30 minutes per week at CHEM-DT Trois-Rivières, CHLT-DT Sherbrooke, CFER-DT Rimouski and CJPM-DT Saguenay)
- Eliminate quota for 25 hours per week of local programming at CFTM-DT Montreal
- Reduce local programming quota for CFCM-DT Quebec City to 16 hours per week from 18
- Eliminate a requirement for 5 hours and 30 minutes a week of local news in Quebec City, while maintaining a requirement to broadcast an equivalent amount of locally reflective programming for the region
- Eliminate a requirement for CFCM-DT to broadcast weekend newscasts
What they say: “Groupe TVA soumet que si le CRTC doit revoir les CDL (conditions de licence) imposées récemment à la SRC — puisqu’elles ne conviennent pas à un diffuseur public — il doit tout aussi rapidement, réviser celles imposées il y a maintenant plus de cinq ans à Groupe TVA — puisque ces CDL ne conviennent nullement à un diffuseur privé dans le contexte économique et concurrentiel actuel, et ne peuvent être imposées pour encore deux autres années.”
Analysis: Quebecor has two applications containing these requests. One related to weekend newscasts in Quebec City is very targeted, and seems reasonable, but Quebecor didn’t do itself any favours when it announced it was going ahead with cancelling the weekend newscast in Quebec City before the CRTC gave it permission to do so. Quebecor then decided, in response to a complaint from the union, to reverse its decision and maintain the weekend newscasts for now.
Had Quebecor not done so, the CRTC would probably have denied the application because it doesn’t permit you to change a licence condition you’re not meeting.
For the rest, the CRTC is probably not going to be eager to let go of the reins entirely on locally reflective news.
Application status: The comment periods for the licence amendment applications closed June 14 and July 4. A separate process sparked by a union complaint about the cancelled newscasts has been suspended in light of the reversal of Quebecor’s decision.
CBC
What they want:
- Exclude, from the calculation of expenditures for the purposes of establishing CPE and PNI quotas, money spent on production of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
What they say: “Programming expenditures are significantly higher in Olympic and Paralympic years. … Their inclusion in the CPE results in a significant increase in the PNI expenditure requirements.”
Analysis: CBC doesn’t have a problem spending money on Canadian content. Its issue is more practical. The Olympics are expensive and represent a nontrivial part of its budget. And because almost all its Olympic coverage qualifies as Canadian content, and because PNI is established as a percentage of CPE spending (unlike for private broadcasters where it’s a percentage of revenues), that bump in spending creates an increase in PNI requirements. But the Olympics do not qualify as PNI, so that money needs to be spent elsewhere.
On top of that, the CBC argues the CRTC set its PNI quota based on three broadcast years that included only one Olympics (the 2018 PyeongChang winter games), and skews the numbers to the point where it will be unable to meet its PNI quota.
Application status: Comments are being accepted until July 31. You can download the application (1 MB .zip file) here or file a comment here.
APTN
What they want:
- Replace APTN’s four-feed offering (APTN East, APTN West, APTN North, APTN HD) with two HD feeds: one with English and French programming, and another with programming 94% in Indigenous languages
- Increase APTN’s per-subscriber mandatory subscription fee to $0.38 per month from $0.35
- Require TV providers to carry and distribute both channels
What they say: “This broadcast feed will provide more hours of Indigenous-language content in more languages on a national scale than APTN has been able to deliver in the past: a minimum of 100 hours of Indigenous-language programming per ‘broadcast’ week and 20 hours based on a 24-hour day.”
Analysis: APTN’s feed structure is unusual, a relic of old times when HD was a fancy new thing that needed a separate channel. It causes some confusion, especially because someone who gets APTN East and APTN HD gets different channels with different programs when they’re used to someone’s SD and HD channels being the same. Consolidating into two HD channels makes sense, though it does mean no more regionalization.
And who can be against more Indigenous-language content?
But the increase to the per-subscriber rate may be contentious. TV providers are already subject to price controls, and already have to spend some of that money on obligatory wholesale costs for mandatory channels like APTN, CPAC, AMI, The Weather Network etc. Offering more Indigenous-language content is a way of softening the blow of asking for more money.
TV5 tried this kind of thing successfully, promising a new channel called Unis with content from francophones outside Quebec in exchange for mandatory subscriptions from all Canadians for both channels. Unis broadcasts some of that minority-language content, but mixed in with reruns of Watatatow and Dans une galaxie près de chez vous.
Application status: Comments are being accepted until July 31. You can download the application (6.6 MB .zip file) here or file a comment here.
UPDATE (July 11): Some of the applications listed above are so similar the CRTC is considering a request by public interest groups to merge them into a single proceeding.
I don’t know about the others, but CTV Montreal airs a whopping 20.5 hours of programming per week and yet covers less than 15 minutes of local news per hour* – and usually, by minute 10, they are already talking about a new bike lane in NDG or a library opening in DDO. Whether it’s a lack of budget (definitely), out of date assignment editors (also definitely), a lack of professional training (maybe) or something else, it’s no wonder Bell wants out. It takes time and effort and money and training to report (not parrot) the news. This is a big city. There is no shortage of stories. There is simply no one left to tell them.
*Rather than argue with me, just watch.
That sounds about right, but was it really that different before? TV news has never had the budget to do major investigative stories on a daily basis, certainly not an entire hour’s worth. And while you might not care about bike lanes and libraries, the viewers do. There’s also the added aspect that TV news needs visuals, so you’re not going to get the same kinds of stories as you will on the radio or in the newspaper.
I agree with you. I know what you’re talking about. And you are correct.
I have stopped watching all local news.
CBMT-DT 6 (CBC) CFCF-DT 12 (CTV), CKGN-DT 15 (Global) , CJNT-DT 62 (City), all of them suck.
And all run by parent companies out of Toronto. They all present just a few nonsense stories at the top of their shows pretending to be local Montreal stations. They are not.
The networks must not be allowed to own all their stations. We need to return to indy stations with network affiliation.
During the Save Local TV campaign from over a decade ago, I seem to remember the result being that the cable/satellite companies were still required to carry local OTA stations, but they also had to start paying for them (and passed that on to consumers). And I remember the PR from the stations was that while we’d have to pay for things that we used to get for free (and still could with an antenna), they would maintain their local programming as part of their licence conditions, and have the money to fund it. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
So here we are, and now they want to eliminate most of the conditions/programming they promised with all this new money? Maybe legally they can get it past the CRTC, but based on their arguments from a decade ago, shouldn’t we take that money away if they’re taking the local programming away? Why even have local broadcast licences in the first place if they’re just going to show national programming? Very few people watch OTA, it’s expensive to run transmitters, why don’t they just hand their licences in and shift all the programming to cable/satellite? I’m not sure how much money they make from these fees, but to me it seems the CRTC should make them shut down and reapply as cable channels with regional distribution, the same way the regional sports channels work. And then if someone wants to set up an OTA station on their relinquished frequencies, they can apply for a licence with local content requirements and get the fees and mandatory cable distribution.
That was the result, until the Supreme Court ruled that this was not legal. Since then, TV providers can (and must) still carry local TV stations for free.
There’s a separate source of funding, in which big cable companies can fund their affiliated local TV stations with money that used to go to nonprofit community TV channels. But otherwise local TV stations don’t have a funding source other than advertising.
No one has applied for a licence for an English-language commercial over-the-air station in decades. It’s not because of a lack of available frequencies. It’s because they just aren’t profitable.
I have heard from friends in media in the United States that local news is the bread and butter of their stations.
It bears out what I learned many years ago at a Harvard class on broadcasting….that salesperson sell ad to advertisers,but programming provides the audiences for those ads.
If programming is poor, or if news is reduced, audiences go elsewhere.
CTV Montréal news is no longer the product it used to be, There is a much higher repeat factor in local stories, and not even different versions if you compare the 5 and 6 O’clock and 11:pm editions.
I could go on, but you message is there…where I used to watch both suppertime and late night news, that is no longer the case.
So the impact of the ads is thereby reduced.
A vicious circle….
Cut the budget for the CRTC and the CBC by half . That would free up some wasted millions.
The source of all these problems is the CRTC, and government in general.
They crush competition, and then stick their noses into how a business should work, and what viewers want to watch.
This will continue to deteriorate, until there is a collapse.
Maybe that’s what they want anyway.
So glad we don’t have television in our house.
Over the years, news has changed, and from my POV, now largely falls into two broad categories: stories that 1) sew fear and confusion (recall when July’s heat was heralded as ‘yay, summer’s finally here!’, rather than the current weather alert/warning and stories that 2) report on studies and polls.
Sidney Margles you are correct. In markets large and small in the USA news is both the profit centre and the identity for the station. Burlington is the 94th biggest market in the States. At 707 k it is smaller than both Anglo MTL and Ottawa. It is about the same size as Quebec City. My NBC 5 has this many newscasts per day: Watch live weekdays at 5 a.m., 6 a.m., Noon, 5 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 6 p.m., 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. …Plus a few more on their co channel. BTW, there are about 30 over the air stations licensed to Burllngton/Plattsburg. Quebec City has five. Canadian broadcasters just don’t give a flying f.
Comparing Canadian vs. U.S. TV stations requires accounting for the fact that U.S. TV stations receive almost half their revenue from cable, satellite and IPTV providers. Canadian stations don’t have that revenue source.
What I don’t get is this: The equipment to record and produce video content has never been cheaper, the bar to entry is so low that you can’t even slide a bug under it. Producing quality 4k video just isn’t all that hard or all that expensive – unless you make it that way.
The same with local content. Youtube should be a huge lesson in being able to produce reasonable content on an extremely limited budget. People’s expectations of content has changed so much in the last 10 years as a result of all of this.
Most major (and even minor) cities in the US local stations live on news. As many hours per day as they can get away with, and more. Many of them have figured out that syndicated programming costs more than just getting their news people to run an extra hour.
What is killing the local markets for each of these companies is that the local market isn’t anything at all. CTV runs the exact same programming across the country day and night, with only the local news being the variable. Otherwise, all of the stations play the same shows and pretty much all at the same time. There is little in the relationship between the local station and the community, because there is so little local station left.
What they are all asking for is what I imagined and mentioned many times in the past: Bell in particular wants the local stations to disappear, to be replaced with one generic “canadian” station, with no actual local content at all. Maybe national news run twice a day with a 5 minute local information insert… you only need maybe 1 or 2 people to pull that off.