Tag Archives: Avis de recherche

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Avis de recherche using desperate legal measures to stay on the air

Control room and studio at Avis de recherche

Control room and studio at Avis de recherche

Avis de recherche, the specialty channel devoted to listing missing people and wanted suspects and talking about other aspects of public safety, got a punch to the gut two and a half years ago when the CRTC decided to end its special status as a must-distribute service that every TV subscriber in Quebec was forced to pay for.

Without that mandatory distribution, providers would no longer want to carry the channel, it would lose its subscription revenue and would cease to exist. Owner Vincent Geracitano knows this well because before ADR got that status, he had to pay Videotron to distribute the channel.

Knowing the channel had value as a public service, the commission gave ADR a two-year grace period to find a new business model. That grace period ended on Aug. 31, 2015, despite ADR’s ill-fated request for another extension.

Now, ADR is using every trick in the book to stay alive:

  • It has politicians writing letters to the federal government asking it to order the CRTC to review and reverse its decision.
  • It filed an application to the federal court seeking a judicial review of the decision.
  • It filed a complaint with the RCMP, alleging political interference in the CRTC decision (based mainly in hearsay evidence).
  • It took Videotron to court, arguing it had a distribution agreement until Dec. 31 and got a temporary injunction keeping it on Videotron’s system.
  • For Bell, ADR has gone to the CRTC and filed for dispute resolution. (A standstill provision says Bell must continue distributing the channel while the dispute resolution process proceeds.) ADR also filed a complaint of undue preference, arguing that Bell’s decision to pull ADR benefits its similar service Canal D Investigation. (I find that hard to understand. ADR is a news and information channel, while Investigation is entertainment. It’s like saying the Weather Network competes with a channel that shows nothing but Sharknado movies.)
  • UPDATE (Jan. 31): ADR has also filed an undue preference complaint against Videotron, arguing ADR is similar to LCN.

ADR proposes some solutions to Bell’s actions, which basically involve ordering Bell to keep the channel. It suggests the commission use its power to order Bell to keep distributing the channel until 2018, when all specialty channels will have lost their protections as a result of decisions taken in the CRTC’s Let’s Talk TV process.

Even if ADR is successful at keeping Bell and Videotron from pulling the channel, it’s just kicking the can down the road. Both distributors have made clear they have no desire to keep distributing the channel because there’s no demand for it.

A survey ADR provided in its application seems to confirm that. It shows only 16% of the 1,000 Quebecers surveyed had ever heard of the channel, and after being told what it was only 18% said they’d ever watched it.

Nevertheless, respondents said public security is important, and after some very leading questions about the value of such a channel, respondents expressed support for it and disagreement (69% vs. 18% support) with the CRTC’s decision to remove its mandatory status.

Respondents were asked how much they’d be willing to pay for it at four price points:

  • At its current 6 cents per month: 89% in favour
  • At 25 cents per month: 73% in favour
  • At 75 cents per month: 52% in favour
  • At $1 per month: 43% in favour

ADR makes it clear that without an order keeping it on some form of mandatory distribution, it would go off air “within days.”

The channel notes it is in a unique position as an independent service that once had mandatory distribution and has since lost it. And Geracitano has devoted his life to public service and this channel. It’s entirely understandable that he’s doing everything he can to keep it going.

But the CRTC has determined the public doesn’t absolutely need Avis de recherche, and it’s not about to change its mind on that. Rather than seek a way to offer programming that might generate demand, ADR is going all in on lawyers. I doubt it will work.

The CRTC is treating ADR’s complaint about Bell seriously but expeditiously, allowing only three days for comment. You can download the complaint here (.zip) and file comments here before 8pm ET on Friday, Dec. 11. Note that all information filed with the CRTC, including contact information, becomes part of the public record.

UPDATE (Dec. 14): This proceeding has resulted in dozens of interventions, almost all of them from politicians, public safety agencies and non-profit groups lined up behind ADR.

One group definitely not on ADR’s side is Quebecor. It notes in its intervention that ADR is a Category B specialty service, which means distributors are free to drop it if they want. It suggests allowing ADR to stay on Bell’s system this way would open the door to abuse of process:

ADR doit se rendre à l’évidence qu’elle n’a pas d’autre choix que d’assumer sa part des risques liés aux différentes politiques du CRTC et d’accepter la perte de son statut de distribution obligatoire.

UPDATE (Dec. 17): Bell’s reply has been published by the commission. Among the key quotes (with my highlights):

  • ADR has known since 24 September 2015 that their service would be removed from carriage on 1 December 2015.  Yet they waited two months to file their second standstill request and to file the Application.
  • ADR has already had two years to adjust to the lack of access rights.  In particular, Decision 2013-372 extended ADR’s 9(1)(h) status for two years to allow the licensee time to adapt its business plan. Bell has not seen any evidence of ADR changing its business plan; rather its plan appears to be to argue for continued carriage at its existing wholesale rate.  Bell does not consider this to be adapting to new distribution circumstances.
  • Given that ADR’s programming is a public benefit for law enforcement agencies, it could attempt to obtain sponsorship from various levels of government. … If such an attempt was made and rejected, then it would appear that law enforcement agencies do not see the value in ADR.
  • At mediation, there was a good exchange of information between the parties, but in the end, Bell’s position did not change. Our subscribers see little or no value in receiving this service as evidenced by the viewership chart for the service provided further below.
  • There is no regulatory requirement for BDUs to make reasonable attempts to ensure that programming services remain viable if they do not believe the service appeals to their subscribers.
  • The Wholesale Code does not afford independent services, such as ADR, penetration guarantees; rather, it only allows them the ability to negotiate for one.
  • There is no similarity between the programming offered by ADR and Canal D/Investigation.
  • The programming on Canal D/Investigation takes the form of documentaries, dramas and reality television shows related to justice and forensic science. It is an entertainment service that broadcasts programs on resolved criminal stories of national and international scope, it is not interactive, nor is it a “Crimestoppers” channel.
  • ADR’s viewership pales in comparison to Canal D/Investigation.
  • There is no evidence on file of their ability to solve crimes.
  • ADR suggests … there is no evidence that Bell plans to rebate its customers for the loss of service of ADR. … We do not make rate adjustments each and every time the cost of a programming service increases or decreases or when a service is added or removed from a package.
  • This Application is simply another attempt to have the Commission extend its mandatory-to-basic 9(1)(h) distribution order; a proposal that has already been rejected.

Bell makes reference to viewership data for ADR above. Because ADR does not subscribe to Numeris, Bell instead used set-top box viewership data from Fibe TV customers. The figures it uses are redacted from the public record, because Bell argues that information is commercially sensitive. So we don’t know what ADR’s actual viewership is among Bell customers, either in real numbers or compared to Investigation, other than it being lower.

UPDATE (April 20, 2016): After its CRTC complaints were rejected, the channel has appealed to Canada’s heritage minister to force the commission to force cable companies to keep paying for it to stay on the air.

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Avis de recherche seeks three-year extension of mandatory distribution

Control room and studio at Avis de recherche

Control room and studio at Avis de recherche

The clock is ticking on Avis de recherche, the Montreal-based specialty channel devoted to public safety information (which mainly consists of information on missing and wanted people, but also has other shows). Last August, the CRTC decided that it no longer was deserving of mandatory distribution in Quebec, charging all digital cable and satellite subscribers in the province $0.06 per month to receive the channel. To lessen the blow, the commission allowed the channel to keep the mandatory distribution status for two years, until Aug. 31, 2015, to give it time to find a new business model.

Avis de recherche insists “there is no viable business plan under these conditions.” The channel is not popular enough for people to want to pay for it or insist their providers offer it (in fact, ADR would have to pay distributors $0.05 per subscriber per month to carry the channel, which is what it did when it launched), and advertisers have little interest in the channel because of its low ratings and because advertisers don’t want to see corporate logos next to pictures of criminals.

So in what seems like a move of desperation more than anything else, Avis de recherche has applied to the CRTC for a three-year extension of its mandatory status, to Aug. 31, 2018.

The application, dated Jan. 15 and published on Friday by the CRTC, deals mainly with some related requests for licence condition changes. (You can read the brief attached with the application here (PDF).) ADR is required to ensure 95% of its programming is Canadian, which is exceptionally high. Once it loses the special status, that drops to the standard 35% for Category B channels. ADR argues this changes nothing because its nature of service can’t be met by the broadcast of non-Canadian programs. So it wants the number brought back up to 95% until 2018, when the mandatory status expires and when it wants its next licence renewal hearing to happen.

Another request is to correct a commission error, which had two conditions of licence that conflict with each other.

ADR stresses that it is a public service channel, not an entertainment channel, and should be treated differently.

Though it’s formally a request for an extension, this seems more like a request for the CRTC to reverse its decision to cancel ADR’s mandatory distribution order. ADR’s application gives no reason to believe that they just need more time to come up with a new business model (in fact, it explicitly states that such a business model is impossible), which means another request for an extension would be inevitable in 2018. (By then, perhaps it hopes that turnover in CRTC commissioners would give them more sympathetic ears that would consider a de facto reversal.)

For this reason, I suspect the main subject of this application will be denied. ADR still has a year and a half to come up with a new model, and the CRTC was undoubtedly aware that shutdown was a very real possibility if it didn’t. The commission came to the conclusion that ADR was not a vital service to Canadians (mainly because it couldn’t prove its effectiveness in improving public safety), and it’s unlikely that has changed after only a few months.

The CRTC is accepting comments about Avis de recherche’s application until 8pm ET on Feb. 24. You can file comments here. Note that all information submitted, including contact information, becomes part of the public record. UPDATE: The CRTC appears to have pulled this application from its website. I’m unsure why.

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Avis de recherche needs a miracle

Avis de recherche staff, from left: journalists Josie Simard, Kariane Bourassa, Jessica Leblanc, Nancy Bourgon and Valérie Beaudoin, president Vincent Géracitano, journalists Andrée-Anne Lavigne and Jessyka Dumulong, and cameraman/director Michel Ciacciarelli

Avis de recherche staff in August, from left: journalists Josie Simard, Kariane Bourassa, Jessica Leblanc, Nancy Bourgon and Valérie Beaudoin, president Vincent Géracitano, journalists Andrée-Anne Lavigne and Jessyka Dumulong, and cameraman/director Michel Ciacciarelli. The staff also included editor-in-chief Hélène Fouquet, journalist Benoit Tranchemontagne, camera operators/directors Maxence Matteau, Gabrielle Laroche and Christian Pichette, archivist Jonathan Veilleux and analyst François Doré.

It’s one of those channels you’ve probably skipped over dozens of times. On Videotron digital cable, it’s channel 49, just between a French pay-per-view barker channel and one of the PBS stations. On Bell Fibe, it’s channel 142, between the French rerun channel Prise 2 and the National Assembly channel. If you’ve ever tuned to it, accidentally or on purpose, you’ve noticed that much of its schedule is slides showing people who are missing or wanted by police.

Avis de recherche seems like a simple channel with a tiny budget and no viewers, and it is. But for president Vincent Géracitano, it’s been his life for the past decade, and he sees it as a mission of public service to keep it going.

Which makes the CRTC’s recent decision to cut the service’s mandatory distribution in Quebec even more perplexing for him.

On Aug. 8, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission came to decisions on requests from existing and proposed TV services for mandatory distribution, a rare and powerful status that requires all television providers to both distribute the service and pay a regulated per-subscriber rate for it. For the most part, it maintained the status quo: most services that had the status already kept it, and most that didn’t were denied. There were a few exceptions: TV5 got its mandatory distribution in exchange for a second channel that targets francophone Canadians outside Quebec; AMI TV got mandatory distribution for a French version of the video description channel; the territories get their legislative channel on satellite (with no subscriber fee) and ARTV gets mandatory carriage (but not on basic).

And there was ADR, the only service that had mandatory distribution whose status wasn’t renewed. A proposed English version of the channel, All Points Bulletin, was denied a request for mandatory distribution.

Even Géracitano admits that without an obligatory per-subscriber fee, Avis de recherche has little hope of survival. Its negligible audience means it has virtually no advertising revenue. And its unpopularity means people aren’t likely to choose to subscribe to it, and cable providers are unlikely to want to continue carrying the channel.

Géracitano has two years to figure out what to do. “In light of the laudable objectives advanced by the service,” the CRTC wrote in its decision, “the Commission will phase out the mandatory distribution requirement over the next two broadcast years (i.e. by 31 August 2015) to allow the licensee time to adapt its business plan in light of this change.”

Despite that cushion, Géracitano told me unless the CRTC changes its mind, the channel will probably just have to shut down by that date. In fact, he’s had to make some tough decisions already. As Christopher Curtis reports in The Gazette, Avis de recherche has already had to lay off 10 of its 16 employees so that it can break even by the time it shuts down.

And Géracitano is mad at the CRTC, convinced that there are nefarious reasons why the project he has worked on for more than a decade is being forced to walk the plank.

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CRTC’s mandatory carriage decisions: Mostly status quo

The CRTC’s long-awaited decision on mandatory carriage came out today. While everyone’s attention was on Sun News Network, which was denied a mandatory carriage order but thrown a bone with a review of rules concerning the distribution of Canadian news channels — see my analysis of that decision here — there were a bunch of decisions here. For the most part, proposals for new services were denied and existing services were renewed, some at slightly higher rates.

The exceptions are these:

  • TV5’s proposal for mandatory distribution across Canada, in exchange for providing a second feed focused on francophone communities outside Quebec, was approved
  • AMItv Français, a French-language described video service that would be a sister network to AMItv, was approved
  • The Nunavut and Northwest Territories’ request for mandatory distribution of their parliamentary channel on Bell and Shaw satellite services was approved
  • ARTV has been awarded an order requiring all digital cable providers offer the service to subscribers, though that can be on a discretionary basis, and at a negotiated rate
  • Avis de recherche was denied renewal of its mandatory distribution order, though it is being given until Aug. 31, 2015, to work out a new business model if it wants to stay alive

Here, in chart form, is what was proposed and what the CRTC decided for each channel:

Channel Description Language Current fee Requested fee Approved fee Conditions Notes
ACCENTS Francophone minority communities French N/A $0.25 Denied Licence denied as it was dependent on mandatory distribution
All Points Bulletin Police bulletins English N/A $0.06 (E) Denied Licence renewed as non-mandatory service
AMI-audio Readings of news articles English $0.04 (E) $0.04 (E) $0.04 (E) Licence renewed
AMItv Described video English $0.20 (E), $0 (F) $0.20 (E), $0 (F) $0.20 (E), $0 (F) Licence renewed
AMItv Français Described video French N/A $0 (E), $0.30 (F) $0 (E), $0.28 (F) New licence approved
APTN Aboriginal English, French and Aboriginal languages $0.25 $0.40 $0.31 Licence renewed
ARTV Arts and culture French N/A N/A N/A Service has access rights across Canada, but remains discretionary Licence was renewed as part of larger CBC licence renewals
Avis de recherche Police bulletins French $0.06 $0.08 $0.06 Service remains mandatory only in Quebec, only until Aug. 31, 2015 Licence renewed as non-mandatory service until 2020
Canadian Punjabi Network Punjabi programs Punjabi N/A $0 Denied Had requested mandatory distribution only in areas with high Punjabi-speaking population. Licence denied as it was dependent on mandatory distribution
Canal M Audio reading service French $0.02 (F) $0.04 (F) $0.02 (F) Licence renewed
CPAC House of Commons and other public affairs programming English and French $0.11 $0.12 $0.12 Licence renewed
Described Video Guide Audio service of described video programming information English N/A $0.02 (E) Denied Licence denied as it was dependent on mandatory distribution
Dolobox User-generated content English N/A $0.06 to $0.08 Denied Service remains licenced but has yet to launch
EqualiTV Programming about people with disabilities English N/A $0.25 Denied Service remains licenced but has yet to launch
FUSION Youth/user-generated content English N/A $0.32 (E), $0.16 (F) Denied Licence denied as it was dependent on mandatory distribution
IDNR-TV Natural resources English/French N/A $0 Denied Licence renewed as non-mandatory service
Legislative assemblies of Nunavut and NWT Legislative hearings English/other N/A $0 $0 Applies only to satellite services Terrestrial distributors in the territories already carry these channels
Maximum Television Video-on-demand English N/A N/A Denied Licence denied as it was dependent on mandatory distribution
Starlight Canadian movies English N/A $0.40 Denied Licence denied as it was dependent on mandatory distribution
Sun News Right-wing news English N/A $0.18 (E), $0.09 (F) Denied The CRTC is looking at setting new rules about distribution of Canadian news channels. Will continue as non-mandatory service
TV5 and TV5 UNIS Francophones outside Quebec French N/A $0.30 $0.28 (F), $0.24 (E) Both channels combined must produce at least 50% Canadian content; Order comes into effect only after TV5 UNIS’s launch Dissenting opinion from Candice Molnar saying service does not qualify for distribution order. Licence renewed
Vision TV Faith programming English N/A $0.12 Denied Licence renewed as non-mandatory service
TOTAL $0.60 (E), $0.44 (F) $2.72 (E), $2.47 (F) $0.91 (E), $1.07 (F) New distribution orders in effect until Aug. 31, 2018.

(F) denotes fees in markets with a majority francophone population, and (E) denotes all other markets. For simplicity, I’ve included Quebec-only distribution orders as French-language markets, though the two definitions are not identical.

Note that this isn’t an exhaustive list of mandatory carriage channels. CBC News Network (in French-language markets), RDI (in English-language markets) and The Weather Network/MétéoMédia also have mandatory distribution at non-zero rates.

UPDATE: L’Express Ottawa speaks to the people behind ACCENTS, who say the CRTC’s decision was flawed and they don’t believe TV5 will properly fulfill the mandate of giving a voice to francophones outside of Quebec.