Quebecor claims Bell’s Super Écran rates caused it undue disadvantage

Quebecor Inc. has lodged another complaint with the CRTC in its long-running fight against BCE Inc., alleging Bell placed it at an undue disadvantage by unreasonably increasing the rate for its Super Écran channel. In its Part 1 submission to the CRTC, lodged on April 24 and written in French, Quebecor claims that Bell made requests for tariffs for Super Écran’s video-on-demand content that were “not at all in line with the fair market value of Super Écran,” knowing Quebecor’s Videotron would be unable to accept them and continue distributing it. Bell had given itself an undue advantage, forbidden by section 9 of the Broadcasting Distribution Regulations, according to Quebecor’s complaint. Since Jan. 21, Videotron subscribers have no longer had access to Super Écran’s video-on-demand content. In its application, Videotron says that withdrawal of the on-demand content had motivated some customers to unsubscribe, because the linear and multi-platform services were “intimately linked” in the eyes of many of its customers. As well as the “unreasonable” rates, ingesting Super Écran’s video-on-demand content into Quebecor’s system would have “tripled” the company’s operation burden, it claimed. Bell added 6,000 hours of French-language content to its Crave streaming service on Jan. 28, a week after its access deal to on-demand content with Quebecor ended. Quebecor’s claims about how many customers had unsubscribed and an exact dollar figure of the “significant revenue losses” it claims to have suffered have been marked as confidential. The Part 1 application is the latest fight between Bell and Quebecor over Super Écran. In December, the CRTC ruled that Quebecor did not confer an undue advantage to its own Club Illico when it removed Super Écran from its premium channels package, as Bell had claimed. In June, Quebecor responded to Bell’s claim that Videotron had unfairly disadvantaged it by placing the channel in its “Other Specialties” package, claiming that Bell had disadvantaged it by putting Super Écran into Bell’s basic service Alt TV IPTV package. On Tuesday, the CRTC approved a request from Quebecor to suspend for three months a requirement that it submit a list to both Bell and the CRTC of the international mobile subscriber identities (IMSIs) of the end-users to whom Videotron had issued two-month and three-month notifications about roaming usage on another network exceeding that on their home network. Filing the reports was one of the conditions handed down to Quebecor by the CRTC in a February ruling, when it denied Bell’s application for its wholesale roaming service to Videotron be suspended. In its June 2019 application, Bell alleged many of Videotron’s customers were permanently roaming on Bell’s network.

Quebecor claims Bell’s Super Écran rates caused it undue disadvantage

Brief | April 28, 2020

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Quebecor claims Bell’s Super Écran rates caused it undue disadvantage

Brief | April 28, 2020

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