Bell Media’s Crull takes aim at U.S. channel retransmission

OTTAWA — The retransmission of U.S. networks in Canada is the equivalent of Aereo, the service ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court last year, Kevin Crull, president of BCE Inc.'s media division, said Friday. “Canada is the only country in the world that allows American networks to be retransmitted without restriction despite valid and exclusive copyrights held by domestic broadcasters,” he said during a keynote address at the Prime Time in Ottawa event put on by the Canadian Media Production Association (CMPA). “In an industry that’s obsessed with intellectual property protection, I’m absolutely stunned that this practice continues. We’re allowing the equivalent of Aereo in Canada.” He added that “this must have made sense at one time, but today it doesn’t.” The practice of simultaneous substitution was a “partial solution” to this when it was introduced in the 1970s, he said. U.S. studios and broadcasters had challenged Aereo’s use of dime-sized antennas to pick up TV programming without a licence and send signals to subscribers via an Internet link. In June 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with broadcasters. Crull’s comments Friday followed statements he made Thursday about the need for a “legitimate and secure rights market.” In January, the CRTC said it would prohibit the use of simultaneous substitution for the Super Bowl starting in 2017 and for specialty channels, but would otherwise keep the practice, which it had considered eliminating. Bell Media, which has the rights to the Super Bowl for the next several years, is challenging that decision in the Federal Court of Appeal. Crull said Friday that without U.S. signals, viewers wouldn’t be denied content because Canadian broadcasters buy rights to almost all American programming. “But we could restore a legitimate rights market,” he said. American channels have an advantage over Canadian channels, he said, because they’re not subject to the same regulations, such as those around Canadian content or the negotiation of carriage fees. Crull also returned to the topic of the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) to watch content licensed to a different geographic region, as about one-third of Canadian Netflix users have done to access the company’s American service, according to a report from CBC/Radio-Canada's Media Technology Monitor. “Netflix should use a credit card and the associated physical address as a determinant of which content assets are delivered, not the IP address, because that can too easily be faked,” he said. During a panel discussion about the CRTC’s Talk TV proceeding, participants noted that the process has caused regulatory uncertainly in the industry. Phase 1 in the proceeding was released in January 2014, while hearings were held in September 2014. The CRTC released decisions on simultaneous substitution and over-the-air transmissions in January, and is set to release directives related to content requirements and genres on March 12. Decisions related to unbundling are not expected until some time after that. “I think the most important thing can do, in many respects, is stop the change after this. There needs to be that period, if there’s going to be adjustment, for the adjustment to happen, and there can’t be more unpredictability introduced in the system,” said John Simcoe, a partner with PwC’s assurance group. Asha Daniere, executive vice-president of business and legal affairs at Blue Ant Media Inc., said CRTC review has had a “decelerating” effect on domestic business. “Almost every day, there’s a decision that we say: 'Oh God, we better wait until a decision comes out because we have no idea what the impact is going to be,' ” she said. That includes discussions with broadcast distributors or conversations about marketing, she said. “It has had a very, very stagnating effect on us, and I imagine on everyone else,” Daniere added. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Bell Media’s Crull takes aim at U.S. channel retransmission

Broadcast | March 6, 2015

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Bell Media’s Crull takes aim at U.S. channel retransmission

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