WITHIN REASON
The ugly skinny on skinny cable packages.
If
you’re a French speaker in Saskatchewan, boy, do the new “skinny basic” cable channel lineups have a screaming deal for you. Of course, the odds of anyone being a French speaker in that province are vanishingly small. Fewer than 1% of Saskatchewanians speak French on a regular basis, the smallest provincial proportion — outside Newfoundland — able to muddle its way through an episode of Tout le monde en parle.
But these are the luckiest one-percenters this side of Wall Street, because in the new, slimmed-down 16-channel “Lite” cable-package universe being offered for the rock-bottom, government-mandated price of $ 25 a month by SaskTel Telecommunications Holding Corp., no fewer than seven of those channels are in French. That means nearly half the package, forcibly sold at a discount by official government policy, caters exclusively to a few thousand people. And the 99% in Saskatchewan who speak only English? They get three Canadian networks, a bit of weather, two parliamentary channels, and the Aboriginal channel. But not a single American network.
A year ago, the Canadian Radio- television and Telecommunications Commission announced that it was dragging Canadian broadcasting into the present by ordering cable companies to offer subscribers a basic, price-capped package by March 2016, rather than squeezing them into expensive bundles. Having got a load of the skinnier packages, critics now complain viewers are being squeezed in a whole different way, with cable companies complying particularly viciously with the regulator’s diktat. “Indeed, the ‘skinny’ on these skinny packages is essentially that no one will want them — and that, paradoxically, is exactly what the cable providers want,” the National Post’s editorial board scoffed. Dwayne Winseck, a Carleton University expert on the sector, said cable giants wanted skinny basic to be “a stillbirth,” dismissing the new deals as “retrograde,” “begrudging” and “behind 1970s standards.”
Cable companies have always been targets of scorn, and they’d be foolish to offer first-class cable perks to subscribers paying coach. But hand it to CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais for fooling us all into believing the regulator is, for the first time in his- tory, on the side of the consumer in standing against the cable barons. Announcing the skinny edict, he said he “was forcing the industry to finally face that the world is changing.” Earlier this year, he railed against broadcasting executives “who own luxury yachts and private helicopters,” but still want the CRTC to protect them from market forces.
But it isn’t facing up to a changing world that tangles up the telecom and cable giants: they’ve been doing that for decades. It’s that the CRTC, despite its consumer-friendly rhetoric, retains an impassable thicket of rules and regulations — such as those that compel cable operators to carry specific, selected channels on even the most basic packages. Even if no one watches them. Greedy shareholders don’t run SaskTel: It’s a Crown corporation. But even it surely knows that it won’t keep its most frugal customers from cutting their cords by offering a basic cable package half-populated by unintelligible programming. The only reason it must is because regulators in Ottawa have deemed the French channels mandatory carriage, meaning the cable provider has no choice but to include them in even the skinniest package.
A smart cable provider might seek to offset the problem by fattening up that bundle with channels that customers actually want to watch. But the CRTC has been fiercely stingy about that, too. When Vidéotron General Partnership in February asked for regulatory permission to add extra channels to its skinny package, still keeping its price at $25, it was refused. That, the CRTC said, would exceed the “maximum” amount of channels Vidéotron was allowed to offer, and would unacceptably blur the distinction between basic and premium packages, controverting the regulator’s goals of offering Canadians an entirely no-frills service.
So, to keep Canada’s media sector current in a universe where Netflix, podcasts and YouTube offer limitless content, this is what the CRTC thinks is consumer friendly: A mandatory cheaper package, loaded with unwatched must-carry stations, with a prohibition on subscribers getting more and better channels for free. Now, was someone saying something about cable companies being the ones out of touch?
THE CRTC, DESPITE ITS CONSUMERFRIENDLY RHETORIC, RETAINS AN IMPASSABLE THICKET OF RULES AND REGULATIONS