Have you seen some of the ads that have appeared on television, sponsored by local broadcasters and aimed at the cable industry? They appear like political attack ads and seem to contain equal amounts of hot air and distortion. That makes sense when you understand their political nature; the parties are trying to make their cases before the CRTC, the body that regulates broadcasters and cable companies.
I confess I enter this discussion with a degree of bias; I spent the biggest part of my life working in the radio and TV industry. I graduated from Radio College of Canada in the early 1950s, became involved in the TV industry before the first Canadian station came on the air, and began working for a cable company in 1968.
There are differences between cable and broadcast people. Actually, economic differences. When we speak of cable TV, we should call it CATV, which stands for community antenna TV. When people had problems getting signals from American stations, creative people built large antenna arrays and distributed signals through coaxial cables. When Canadian stations came on the air, new cable companies added signals from local stations. At some point, the CRTC ruled cable companies carry signals from local broadcasters. That did wonderful things for TV stations in Kitchener; now people living in the adjacent cities of London, Brantford, Guelph and beyond could receive good pictures from that station. Without cable, people in more distant cities needed expensive antennas to get those signals, and then they often got more noise and snow than pictures. With cable, TV stations had a larger reception area. They could, and did, accept advertising aimed at a much larger audience.
I don’t believe cable companies ever asked the broadcasters for money for distributing their signals to remote communities. That wide distribution of signals meant the broadcast networks didn’t need to build stations in places like Guelph, Brantford and Cambridge. They could use central locations to provide news coverage and advertising to those areas and know viewers would receive clear pictures and sound on cable.
When people in those remote communities began to clamour for more local programming, the cable companies met the need, not the broadcasters. They built studios to provide programming that appeared only on the cable system. The CRTC liked the idea and required that all cable companies do so. Initially, regulations prohibited them from selling advertising, but eventually that rule changed. Throughout the history of broadcasting in Canada, the cable companies, not the broadcasters, demonstrated imagination and commitment to smaller communities.
As the industry progressed, specialty channels began to appear on cable. The owners of the specialty channels pay the cable companies for distribution. The local broadcasters have never paid for that privilege. Now they want to reverse the process and have cable companies pay them.
I believe they abuse the process by whining to the public in an attempt to influence the CRTC into giving them special privileges at the expense of the cable companies or their subscribers.