From CBC:
Pick-and-pay TV: Consumer choice, but at what cost?
Cable à la carte is finally on the menu, letting TV viewers order the channels they crave without charging them for programming they never wanted to consume in the first place. Just be wary that under the new rules, the bill could come as a shock. Continue reading.
There’s a lot of press on the CRTC’s pick and pay decision and a lot of different opinions on what it means for consumers and for the broadcast industry. I’m reluctant to throw in my 2 cents but here goes.
Only time will tell.
During the Talk TV public hearing there were a lot of studies submitted on the potential impact of unbundling. Many of them had differing opinions on consumer behaviour because of the variables at play. To what extent would the CRTC require unbundling and if it did, how would the cable and satellite companies price their individual services or packages? How would consumers react to their options? No one could (or should have) concretely said ‘if channels are unbundled, the consumer will do x and the result will be y’.
And we still don’t know.
Here’s what we do know. The cable and satellite companies have until March 2016 to implement a skinny basic at $25 that includes local channels, mandatory carriage channels (e.g. CPAC and APTN), educational channels and provincial legislature channels. It ‘could’ include the big U.S. networks but must be sold at no more than $25 per month. On top of that they must offer either the opportunity to pick and pay for individual channels or small packages that they either build or are themed. By December 2016 cable and satellite companies must offer both individual and small package choices on top of skinny basic.
Here’s what we don’t know:
We won’t know what this means for the industry until the cable and satellite companies start to market the new offerings (possibly later this year) and consumers react to it and the dominoes start to fall. Or not.
One thing I do have to note is that it appears that the CRTC has given the Conservatives an election gift. It has provided them with the opportunity to say ‘look, we gave you cheaper cable bills’ before unbundling is implemented and the consumer has a chance to say, as may be the case, ‘no you didn’t’.  That could be completely unintentional but it cannot have been unexpected.
From Simon Houpt of The Globe and Mail:
Cheap politics, cheap TV: CRTC hands Tories a populist election platform
The thing that apparently caused people to riot in the streets (or at least the modern equivalent: send angry e-mails to the CRTC) was the common industry practice of bundling TV channels. Most people regularly watch only a couple of dozen channels on a regular basis, and they are tired of paying for the hundreds of others available on their cable lineups.
So the Harper government, which is all for free enterprise except when there are votes to be had, decided to do something about it. Too bad they made the CRTC look slavish in the process. Continue reading.
From Bill Harris of QMI Agency:
Why the CRTC’s $25 ‘skinny basic’ package may not work
So Canadians will have “affordable access†to a bunch of network and educational and government TV channels they have shown less and less interest in watching anyway.
What a breakthrough! (That was sarcasm, in case you missed it.) Continue reading.
From Kate Taylor of The Globe and Mail:
A lower cable bill with pick-and-pay? Don’t bet on it
If anybody should be dancing in the rec room at the news the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will now require television distributors to offer consumers more flexibility in pricing, it should be me. But my joy is tempered by realism, a lot of realism: I don’t think the pick-and-pay model now being imposed on the distributors is going to significantly lower cable bills. And I do think it will do some damage to the Canadian TV industry. Continue reading.
