Bell files complaint against Rogers’ online NHL offerings

BCE Inc. has filed a challenge with the CRTC against Rogers Communications Inc.’s plan to offer its own customers free access to its NHL streaming product until the end of the year as well as exclusive content while watching games. Bell claims the free trial of Rogers’ NHL GameCentre, announced in September, amounts to anticompetitive behaviour under the CRTC’s rules for digital media. The move to offer the live-streaming app for free to Rogers wireless and broadband customers until Dec. 31 of this year is “designed to deny content to competitors' subscribers and gain an anticompetitive advantage for Rogers' own wireless and Internet businesses,” Bell chief legal and regulatory officer Mirko Bibic said in an Oct. 14 letter to the CRTC posted to the commission's website Tuesday. In an accompanying application, Bell notes that those who are not Rogers customers must pay the full price, $199.99, to access NHL GameCentre for the season. The company also said that Rogers is offering its customers an extra product, GamePlus, which features exclusive content including extra camera angles and “advanced stats, exclusive interviews and expert analysis.” GamePlus, which was announced earlier this month, is only available to those who sign up for GameCentre and subscribe to Rogers telecom services. “GamePlus is being offered on an otherwise preferential basis to Rogers' mobile and retail Internet access subscribers,” Bell said in its filing. “This gives an advantage to Rogers' own wireless and Internet distribution businesses. That is precisely why Rogers is doing it.” GamePlus should be available to every GameCentre subscriber regardless of their telecom service provider, Bell said in the filing, and if Rogers is allowed to continue offering the free trial, “other distributors will respond aggressively in the marketplace with their own exclusive and otherwise preferential arrangements in connection with other programming.” As the NHL season has already begun, Bell said, the CRTC should act quickly to “ensure compliance.” In an email, Rogers spokeswoman Patricia Trott said the complaint was an attempt by Bell to disrupt a competitor’s business. “It’s a shame that Bell is trying to stop innovation in hockey; this may be one of the reasons they failed to secure the rights in the first place,” she said. “We have invested in significant new innovation to bring Canadians an enhanced experience and, judging by the thousands of fans that are logging in every game night, it is working.” Under the CRTC’s digital-media exemption, which Bell quoted in the filing, companies are prohibited from offering “television programming on an exclusive or otherwise preferential basis in a manner that is dependent on the subscription to a specific mobile or retail Internet access service.” Because GamePlus content, such as the extra camera angles and analysis segments, is produced by Rogers employees, "the same team operating the same equipment at the same time in the same place as the programming broadcast by Rogers,” Bell said, it is technically television programming and therefore can't be exclusive. Trott disagreed. “Clearly this programming is not designed for conventional TV,” she said. “Conventional TV broadcasts the exact same program to a mass audience, and every person sees the same content, presented the same way. With GamePlus, each fan has a unique experience since they can choose the camera angles and the replays they want to watch.” The new camera angles and other content were “designed primarily for the internet,” she said. “We wouldn’t have developed them solely for broadcast use. This is just the kind of innovative, viewer-friendly content the CRTC exemption policy was meant to encourage.” Bell spokesman Jason Laszlo said the company had no further comment than what it included in the filing. Greg MacDonald, a telecom analyst with Macquarie Capital Markets, said Bell’s challenge was another salvo in the ongoing rivalry between the two companies. “Companies, where they see a crack, they always will take the road of going through the CRTC or through the courts,” he said. MacDonald said Bell's challenge also points to one of the underlying issues of the changing media world. "They're trying to challenge to get the CRTC to start putting some meat around what it considers the difference between content for the web and content for TV," he said. Determining whether Rogers’ GamePlus extras are TV content, and therefore must be made available to all, or are online content, and therefore can be exclusive to Rogers, gets to the debate over the future of CRTC regulations, MacDonald said. “This highlights where, in a web-based world, the real question to ask yourself is how we define content in the future,” he said. The popularity of YouTube and other online distribution avenues as well as the success of some amateurs using these platforms, MacDonald said, points to a future in which the content producers and owners become more powerful versus the broadcasters. For companies like Rogers and Bell, he said, buying up the exclusive rights to content will become more important to their bottom line than simply selling network access. “There's a shift in power that's occurring because of the web,” he said. “I'll be very interested to see where the CRTC comes down on this, but I think it's inevitable that the shift in power goes to content origination. And it seems like in the case of hockey, Rogers has been the most aggressive at locking it up.” Meanwhile, the CRTC said in an online notice Tuesday that it will hold a hearing on Jan. 8 on an application from Rogers for a licence that authorizes its agreement with CBC/Radio-Canada to use the public broadcaster to show some NHL hockey games while Rogers maintains editorial control of the programming. This arrangement with CBC was revealed last year, when Rogers announced its $12-year, $5.2-billion deal to secure the national rights to broadcasting NHL games on all platforms. The Rogers-CBC relationship got underway this month as the new hockey season began, and the CRTC said Rogers has been issued a temporary licence for the broadcasts. The regulator said in its online notice that it told Rogers this summer to apply for CRTC authorization of its agreement with CBC because it "would help set out the roles and responsibilities of the parties as well as the purpose of the network." — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Bell files complaint against Rogers’ online NHL offerings

Broadcast | October 21, 2014

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