I’ve always been sceptical of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the government agency in charge of regulating broadcasting and telecommunications.

After all, it seems to be staffed by a group of public servants who are guided by the “let the market decide” mantra, as opposed to their legislated responsibility to create and sustain a viable broadcast and telecom sector that actually works for Canadians and delivers innovative, high- quality content and services.

Despite my misgivings, I have to admit that it seems as though the CRTC is actually on the right track … for now at least! Of course, this is only a recent development, so maybe I should hold back on my excitement.

Last week, I wrote about the rumours surrounding the upcoming broadcast license hearings – there was talk that the scope of these hearings was going to be changed due to the economic pressures facing the broadcast sector.

On Friday (February 13), the rumours were confirmed as the CRTC announced that given the state of the economy and the failing financial health of broadcasters, licenses would be renewed on a short-term, one year basis, as opposed to the regular seven-year term.

Surprisingly, this move is not only favoured by the major broadcasters excited about this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically alter Canada’s media policy, but also by well-known interest groups, such as the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, who are concerned about the state of broadcasting.

Now, I won’t bore you with the policy details of the Friday announcement, but in a nutshell, the CRTC posed a number of questions relating to programming and policy, including:

1. Should the Commission continue to require a minimum level of priority programming in the short term?

2. What are appropriate local programming obligations for the short term, given the current economic climate?

Essentially, both of these questions boil down to the issue of Canadian Content (CanCon), which I’ve argued will be the main battleground issue in the upcoming hearings.

At the end of the renewal hearings, it will be interesting to see if the CanCon and local programming rules are relaxed, and if that leads to broadcasters airing only the cheaper, more advertising/revenue-friendly American content during the highly-coveted prime time slots.

Of course, it will be even more interesting to see if these changes are permanent and how the CRTC handles the issue of potentially increasing CanCon and local programming quotas during the long-term hearings scheduled for April of 2010.

Then again, it will be most interesting to see how these license hearings play out in light of the planned switch to digital broadcasting, currently scheduled for August of 2011.

But hold up … before we even get there, we have to get through the upcoming new media hearings scheduled to begin this week.

Ever since their hotly contested 1999 New Media decision, the CRTC has faced calls to re-examine the rules of the Internet in light of the rapid rise of online and digital technologies.

And so in October of 2008, they announced that in early 2009, there would be a wide-ranging review of Canada’s new media policy, or lack thereof.

The issues covered in these hearings will pretty much cover everything to do with online media; however, it will be important to note how these proceedings will affect online broadcast content, whether or not the CRTC will impose content quotas on online providers, and how the CRTC will deal with emerging concerns over net neutrality and bandwidth tampering.

All in all, this next year and a half stands to be very interesting in terms of broadcasting, telecommunications, and new media policies in Canada.

I just hope that the CRTC really is on the right track, because if they aren’t, I can promise you that by August 2011, the Canadian mediascape will be forever changed – perhaps for the better, but most likely, for the worst.

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Tags: canadian radio-television and telecommunications commission, cancon, crtc, Media, telecommunications

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.