The CRTC has launched its latest consultation looking at market dynamics within the Canadian broadcasting system.
The commission says the consultation will explore the dynamics between small, medium and large broadcasters, television service providers and online streaming services with an eye to building a modernized Broadcast Act that ensures a sustainable, fair and competitive system where Canadians can find the services and content they want.
One of a series of consultations working towards implementation of the Online Streaming Act, Scott Shortliffe, Executive Director, Broadcasting, said this proceeding won’t present a lot of preliminary views as the commission tries to understand the market and how it’s working.
“It’s really about the rules of the road…we’re trying to understand dynamics of the market and as we walk through the consultation, we ask a lot of questions about how is the market changing? What’s influencing it? What should we consider? And then look at our tools, because what we want is to have a system adaptable to the future, not one that just meets the moment for today.”
Shortliffe said those questions will apply to conventional audio-visual services, but also audio and streaming services.
He told a technical briefing that the Canadian system is at a crossroads as we move out of a metaphorical “walled garden” to a broadcast ecosystem where Canadians seek out content in a vastly different way.
“We recognize that when Canadians access material now, they’re using different technology, it’s changing technology and they’re looking at internationally available content,” said Shortliffe. “That means that when you look at a system that was fundamentally in some ways designed around a closed system, a walled garden, the commission has to bear in mind that rules we have take into account that reality and that Canadians seek out content they didn’t seek out in the past, and that they access it using technologies that weren’t available in the past.”
“We’ve built rules and built a system of rules that we think have served the country very well in the past, but as we look at changing technology, changing consumer habits, and the realities of today, we know that our system needs adjustment in the future and that’s why we want to better understand the market dynamics and then adjust our rules accordingly in such a way that it supports the two big themes we have – that we’ll have a sustainable broadcasting system where Canadians can access what they need to access, which includes news, and that we’ll have a fair and equitable system where you have small, medium and large players in the system and it’s not overly dominated by any one of those groups.”
Shortliffe acknowledged the commission is trying to get ahead of potential “existential threats” to the Canadian broadcasting system.
“We’re trying to understand what’s happening in the system to see where there should be rules and who they should apply to…how Canadians get access to services and how that may evolve in the future and then try to design something around it,” said Shortliffe. “How will we intervene in the system appropriately to achieve our public policy ends, but to ensure there’s a Canadian broadcasting system that is bringing diverse content…but in a broader sense a diverse range of voices, that Canadians can access a lot of different content including Canadian broadcasting content and Canadian news.”
The commission is welcoming comments until Feb. 24.
