Community TV & The CRTC

I'LL BE POPPING up in a number of CBC Morning shows this morning, talking about the CRTC hearings on Community Television & the failure of the cable companies' to provide it over the last twenty years.


To anybody following the saga of the CRTC & its abrogation of responsibility to Canadian citizens, this could seem like one more sordid story of the fixed game & how the regulator favors corporate interests over its watchdog role for Canadians, but even by those lax standards, this story's a bit sordid.


I'll be updating this story throughout the morning in between short hits on the morning shows in Gander, Sudbury, Corner Brook, Yellowknife, Victoria, Calgary, Whitehorse and Vancouver.


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So the story goes like this: once upon a time, Canada helped pioneer the whole idea of "community access tv."  Canadians took to cable tv early, as a way to get those precious U.S. stations in crystal-clear.  This made Canadians very early adopters in the world of cable-delivered television. Even today, the number of homes that subscribe to Cable or satellite is higher, by percentage, than it is in, say, the United States.


As part of the deal to defray the cost-intensive investment of putting in the cable lines in communities across Canada, cable co's were given strong regional monopolies.  In exchange, they were heavily regulated under the Broadcast Act -- rates and conditions of license were set.


One of the most notable of these conditions of license was the rule establishing Community Access TV.  Every cable company with a subscriber base of greater than 20 000 customers was required to pay a levy of 2% of gross revenues, that would go into the maintenance & production of local cable stations. Those local cable stations were to broadcast 30% of programs of local interest, generated by the community. In this way, community tv was supposed to be the third tier of broadcasting in our country -- after public (The CBC, local educational stations like TVO, etc.) and private (CTV, Global.)


A generation of people working in TV got their first start at this community level, receiving their first training as camerapeople, sound people, editors, producers or on air hosts.  I did a movie review show on a suburban Ontario local station when I was in university, and many of the people I met at Ryerson University first cut their teeth on their local community stations.


The mythology of the cable channel went far beyond that.  Viewers in Ottawa first got exposed to shock comic Tom Green through his hilarious and odd local show -- which predated the shock comic's 90's program on MTV.   And anyone familiar with Mike Myers' Wayne Campbell "Wayne's World" SNL sketches & eventual movies know that character was the host of his own Cable show, and the character was based on Myers' own experiences volunteering at his local Scarborough Cable 10 channel.


Where things started to change was 1997. That's when cable was deregulated in this country. Suddenly, the restrictions about cable rates were taken off the local cableco's, and ownership provisions were relaxed.  This triggered a consolidation spree in the industry.   Where there were once dozens of cable companies across the country, slowly bigger players like Shaw, Rogers, and Cogeco gobbled them all up.   This led to a consolidation at the community station level, too.


It might not have been so easy to see in a big city like Toronto, (though what was once Etobicoke Cable 10, Scarborough, North York 10, etc. became one-city wide "community station")  in smaller communities, the "local" programming once made by neighbours started to fade in favour of programs made hundreds of km's away. The local flavour was lost.


Around the same time, the cable companies started to shift their focus away from even trying to fulfill that 30% "access" mandate, and programs on the community channels became more "professional", produced by in house staff.


Incredibly, not once in that entire time did the overseer, the CRTC, ask to review or see any of the cable company's records to make sure they were fulfilling their obligations to Canadians.  So what started as small abuses grew and grew and grew.  When the CRTC did limited reviews in 2002, and 2005 of selected channels, they found so many violations in terms of missing logs, no backups, etc, that a picture of the system was impossible to construct.


What did become clear, through the spin and haze of the community cable debacle, was that the spirit of the enterprise had become entirely compromised. In many cases, cable companies were counting as "access programming," "programs" that were nothing more than barker reels and shills for cable services.   MTV promos were counted as "community programming," and audits revealed that the cable companies ran far more commercials & promos for themselves than they were allowed to by law in any local programs they did run.


In essence, a winfall of over $100 million (2008 numbers) a year that was supposed to provide Canadians' access to the airwaves was being used by the cable co's to underwrite their businesses.  We're talking about $680 million since 2002.




Now think about the fight over "Local TV" and the "TV Tax."  Puts a different spin on it, doesn't it?



Cable co's spent millions last year (all of which they got from you) trying to convince people that any "value for signal" charges had to result in a bigger cable bill --  for you.  Because, you know, they had no choice but to pass it on.


Now we find out that not only have these companies -- who have raised your rates shamelessly -- more than 60 percent in the last decade -- hugely increased their profits...they haven't even come close to meeting the minimal threshold of their promises to "give back" to the communities they serve.


And the CRTC let it all happen.  Of course.


There may be those who say that in the age of YouTube, community access tv has had its day.  First of all, that's not the point -- and it doesn't excuse or erase the culpability of cable in these matters.  They promised something in exchange for monopolies, and then deregulation -- and they didn't do it.

Yes, it's true. The next Mike Myers will probably come from YouTube, not Cable 10.  But saying one replaces the other leaves out two big salient facts -- 1) the people accessing community cable tend to be older & less internet savvy and 2) the difference between the way YouTube works & the way Cable TV works.

For all the talk of the "democratizing" effect of the internet -- every survey shows that most people visit the same few sites over and over. For every viral video with 100 000 or 2 million hits there are plenty more that have 40 hits & under.  Nobody's tuning in YouTube to get local politics news, or the farm report.  If I can make an analogy I've used in a few of these interviews, saying YouTube replaces community TV is akin to saying that we should cancel readings in the Public Square, because the fact that that book is on the shelf in the library (next to 100 000 other books) is the same thing.

Does that make sense to you?


The community groups who are appearing this week before the CRTC say enough is enough -- and that the $100 million cable raises each year should go to groups, who'll produce their own tv.  But you can see in their briefs just how frustrating it is to try to get some traction on this issue:

There is very little information provided in the public notice about the performance of community TV channels in Canada, however. CACTUS is concerned about this absence and requested under Access to Information legislation for information that all cable companies are required to keep: logs of hours of "community-access" programming, the titles of such programs, and the names of parties provided access. We received a letter back from the CRTC saying that while it is true that cable companies must collect and keep such information for one year, since the CRTC itself has never requested such information, it cannot provide us with this information. We had asked for information going back to 1990. So, the CRTC's reply is in effect an admission that it has not monitored the cable industry's spending of more than $100,000,000 annually on "community programming" in almost 20 years.

Since that request, we have discovered that limited audits were done of selected cable companies in 2003, 2004 and 2005, that confirm what we had been hearing anecdotally... that many cable-run community channels repurpose programming among different systems, that levels of access programming are very low, and that misreporting about original hours of production and access hours of production is common.

This should be a scandal -- but watch how little it goes reported -- and then ruminate a bit on how well you're being served by your media.