Get Ready For The Great Canadian TV Wealth Transfer
Our Canadian TV stations are in big trouble.. no one is watching them. Revenues have plummeted by as much as 98% for some stations.
Maybe we are trying to tell them something?
So instead of trying something novel like retiring our ancient anchors and creating programming worthy of wasting an hour watching, they’ve decided that we, the slightly overburdened taxpayers, should pay them for their crappy service.
It started here:
CRTC allows Canadian broadcasters to show unlimited commercials.
Hot on the heels of the 1.5% tax that consumers will have to pay to the Local Programming Improvement Fund, and fee for carriage that is sure to see our Cable and Satellite bills ballon even further, the CRTC has stuck it to the consumer once again. Effective September 1st, Canadian broadcasters are now allowed to air as many commercials as they want, previously, broadcasters were limited to 15 minutes per hour of advertising. I have a feeling that this slipped past the media as two of the Canadian broadcasters, Global and CTV own the newspaper and TV news outlets.
By the way, this new tax means $300 million the cable companies have to pay the stations – who pays this? More than 6% of your total TV bill goes directly to the wise folks at the CRTC, or other special funds created by the CRTC.
Then:
TORONTO — The Canadian government has backed down and agreed not to collect around $450 million in annual license fees from private broadcasters, cable and satellite TV operators as part of an out-of-court settlement. The broadcasters deemed the $100 million that they annually pay Ottawa an illegal tax, and the Supreme Court of Canada was to hear their case on October 19.
The CRTC, Canada’s TV regulator, stopped billing the broadcasters in 2006 when the legal challenge against the license fees was first made.
The late fees, now totaling $450 million, were instead held in escrow accounts. Ottawa agreed to not collect those late-fees if the broadcasters agreed to a new regime to be introduced by the CRTC that would cap future fees at around $100 million a year.
Looks like they now have $450 million to help them compete. They now can afford to add to their programming and pilot another gem Little Mosque on the Prairie.
Thankfully, I finally figured out how to remove all Canadian TV stations from my menu… and Hulu has almost everything we watch for free. (Although you need to learn how to proxy yourself to somewhere in the US – as it’s blocked in Canada)
Next on my list… dropping my cable.
photo credit: therozblog
October 10th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
It’s not just the poor content. TV simply not relevant any more. It’s a medium with no future. There’s nowhere for it to grow – it can only shrink.
And shrink it must. All that time that people use on the Internet – playing games, surfing, on social sites, blogging – that time used to be TV time. The Internet offerings are ever changing, while TV has nothign new to offer.
In our house the TV cable was disconnected 7 years ago, and we almost never miss it. I know many parents who have done the same. The standard line in our house is “TV makes you stupid”. And I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe this to be true, to one degree or another.
When the current generation grows up, most will not consider TV a significant part of their lives. As the oldies who grew up on TV die off, the medium will shrink drastically, or more likely vanish altogether.
October 10th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
“So instead of trying something novel like retiring our ancient anchors and creating programming worthy of wasting an hour watching …”
Bingo. The Canadian networks have the same tired old boring news readers for decades: are they union employess? Do they own their jobs? Why would anyone even go into media in Canada when the dinosaurs can’t be retired? The US networks are always fine tuning their people to the right mix, keep it interesting, and and to give the consumer what they want: not here though. In Canada, it’s take it or leave, and most of us have chosen the latter.
October 11th, 2009 at 2:53 am
My question is if I ever decided to rent a hall, put a big screen in it and charge a nominal fee for folks to watch a program, but never “share” a portion with the network or cable company that aired said program, how long would it be before the local ocnstabulary would show up with a court order to drag me off?
I’ll further qualify that this wouldn’t be in the Caledonia Ontario area where court orders are meaningless.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:23 am
What I find funny with those ads they have two from the two sides of the debate back to back. First an ad against the new tv tax sponsered by bell and rogers, then the next add all for the new tv tax sponsered by ctv, a-channel etc. Bell happens to own ctv and a-channel stations so what exactly are their motives here? They are running non-stop ads for and against this new tax at the same time. I believe bell and rogers are purposfully trying to destroy the over the air free networks so eventualy everybody has to pay for their satellite or cable, but I don’t know what they are up to playing both sides on this.