Variety on television must be preserved, says Bell’s Crull

OTTAWA — Industry executives disagreed about the best way to give consumers more choice as they discussed the CRTC’s ongoing review of the television system during a panel discussion at the Prime Time conference on Thursday. Louis Audet, president and CEO of Cogeco Cable Inc., said customers are demanding more TV-packaging flexibility, while Kevin Crull, CEO of BCE Inc.’s Bell Media subsidiary, quoted Henry Ford, stating that “if I had asked consumers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.” “I think that Louis’ business and everybody’s business is very much about , but another input is that we’re meant to be, in many ways, experts in our field,” Crull said. When consumers tell companies like Cogeco and Bell, as well as the CRTC, that they only want to pay for they watch, “for those of us who are experts in this business, what falls apart when you follow that down logically, it says ‘I only want to pay for what I like.’ ” The way customers discover what they like, he said, is by discovering it through having a variety of content available, Crull said. “What I like is the result of exploration. It’s the result of watching a lot of stuff I don’t like to find what I do like,” he said, adding that companies have to employ a business model that is able to fund that variety of content. The CRTC released a questionnaire on Tuesday in Phase 2 of the consultation, called “Let's Talk TV: A Conversation with Canadians.” The review will end with the third phase, a launch of a public proceeding starting in the spring of 2014 to review any proposed changes to the TV broadcasting system. At the same time, the CRTC is working on producing, by April 30, a report outlining the potential impact of a move to a pick-and-pay regime, following a federal cabinet order issued last year. During the federal government’s throne speech last October, it promised to “unbundle” television channels. At the panel discussion Thursday, Audet said customers have been asking for more packaging flexibility for more than a decade. “Consumers are telling us they want more choice on the platforms that they use, and sure they use over-the-top, and that’s a wonderful new avenue that’s opened up in the last six years … but they also say, ‘I want to pay only for what I watch. Give me that opportunity,’ ” he said. In November, the Wire Report reported Cogeco plans to introduce a pick-and-pay offering in markets outside of Quebec, where it currently offers a version of pick-and-pay in which customers choose which individual channels to include in their packages, in addition to basic cable. On Thursday, Crull indicated that most Canadians are satisfied with the current system. He noted that the first phase of the CRTC’s consultation received 1,300 responses, a response rate that he said “kind of says most people say ‘Hey, we’re being served pretty well.’ ” Raja Khanna, chief executive at independent broadcaster Blue Ant Media Inc., called pick-and-pay a “red herring.” He said the question should be: “How do you evolve the current regime to encompass the disruption that’s happening from technology, the disruption that’s happening from new consumer demand for more choice?” while also ensuring there are independent voices in the system and the Broadcasting Act is upheld. “I think that’s what we need to focus on, not basic, skinny basic, pick-and-pay.” He said a new generation of consumers is used to having choice — for instance, choosing what applications they purchase, and that “customer experience is very compelling.” “If iTunes said, ‘You have to stop buying these apps and you have to pay us $300 a month and we’re going to give you 300 apps,’ how would you react? ‘And we’re going tell you which 300 apps, mostly,’ ” he said. “It doesn’t work anymore. … The new generation of content consumers don’t think that way. So there has to be more choice.” At the same time, that doesn’t mean pick-and-pay is the answer, Khanna added. He noted that Blue Ant is “a little broadcaster that would be in big trouble in a pure pick-and-pay environment. I’m not for a second suggesting that that’s what has to happen in TV. I’m suggesting that we have a real problem, and we have to figure out how to reconcile that to keep people within the system.” He added that people are consuming media on different platforms, and that there is currently a “free-for-all” on the Internet. “It’s a misnomer to say YouTube is low-quality cats on skateboards. It’s not,” he said. “There is high, high quality programming there that is being funded by places other than television and it is being watched by millions of Canadians.” — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.caand editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Variety on television must be preserved, says Bell’s Crull

Broadcast | February 20, 2014

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Variety on television must be preserved, says Bell’s Crull

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