Subscribe To This Site

Daren in Brief - DIE BROADCASTERS DIE III
by Daren Foster

Die Broadcasters Die!

BEST CANADIAN MOVIES PODCAST

WATCH FILMS
2008 Shorts
2007 Shorts
Drama Shorts
Comedy Shorts
Horror Shorts
Animation Shorts
Action Shorts
Thriller Shorts
DOC Shorts
Experimental
Musical Videos
1 Minute Movies

CREATIVE IDEAS
Producing a Film
Film Crews
Directing a Film
Screenplay Writing
Directing Actors
STORY Pitching
The Writers Way
Film Photography
Film Editing
Sound Design
Art Direction
Documentary Film
Writing a Grant
Film Distributing
Acting Quotes
Director Quotes

Daren in Brief
Die Broadcasters Die!

by Daren Foster

I just caught one of CTV’s “Save Local Television” ads and my first thought was to write to my MP demanding that the CRTC immediately pull the company’s broadcast license. These private broadcasters are shameless and in throwing their lot in with the diabolical Canwest, CTV has lost any integrity I grudgingly gave them for their efforts -- by no means Herculean but positively heroic in comparison to the likes of Canwest -- in occasionally living up to their obligations to produce legitimate Canadian programming. No more. I am now convinced more than ever that Canadian television from local to national would be better served if the private broadcasters collapsed and we simply started all over again.

These ads would have us believe that local television is under threat because the cable and satellite providers pilfer the broadcasters’ content. That, in a word, is bollocks. While no fan of the cable and satellite companies (one of which, Express Vu, is owned by the same parent conglomerate that owns CTV.. pause while I scratch my head here.. I mean, how exactly is having one branch of the company paying another branch going to save the umbrella company any money?), the broadcasters are simply bold-face lying about the source of the threat to local programming.

The broadcasters have been gutting their local affiliates since going on a spending spree a decade ago to build bigger, ‘more competitive’, oligopilistic behemoths that would rule the new media landscape that was forming on the horizon. Canwest leveraged itself to buy a newspaper chain from the felonious Conrad Black. Newspapers?! How short-sighted was that? In addition, private networks spent over ¾ of a billion dollars (that’s right, billion dollars) last year to purchase American programming! And they want us to believe that it’s cable and satellite providers that are the looming threat to local television?

In fact, cable and satellite providers are a boon to our private networks since it is their technology that pipes television directly into our homes that allows broadcasters to intercept American TV signals and insert their own advertising, generating the revenue they use to buy more American programming. Simulcasting they call it, and it would be almost impossible to pull off if we were still dependant on rabbit ears and metal clothes hangers to receive the OTR signals.

So no, it isn’t the cable and satellite companies that are a threat to local television. It’s bad business practices on the part of the private networks that’s at the heart of this. Let us not be bamboozled by the network hype. They’re the villains here and we can only move forward over their bloated corpses.

Everybody now, singalong with me: Die broadcasters, die!