Shaw

Jim Shaw, CEO of Shaw Communications says that he’s tired of CRTC hearings – and that he doesn’t think he should have to pay to carry local TV.

Dear Mr. Shaw: I’m a customer of yours and I’m tired of the rates going up. Since the cable industry was degregulated in Canada the rates for service have increased four-fold over the rate of inflation and you’ve pulled in record profits. Yet you seem reticent to pay for the local service that you insist has to be free. The hubris of this actually makes my head hurt. You, and your fellow providers, aren’t willing to dip – even slightly – into your record profits and pay for the programs that you carry, instead insisting that you’d have to pass the bill on to consumers. It’s clear, at the point, that there’s not nearly enough competition in Canada – if there were, we’d have at least one provider who was willing to do the right thing, and consumers could choose to buy their service there.

Mr. Shaw, I’m not just tired of the rate increases, I’m tired of the entitled rants of you, Mr. Nadir Mohamed, and the rest of the cable/sat CEO crew. You should indeed be held accountable when your company engages in anti-competitive activities like trying to stomp out smaller providers (Novus comes to mind). In the words uttered famously by the current governor of California: “STOP WHINING.” It’s your job to sit at the table like a big boy and negotiate. Is it any wonder that CTV CEO Ivan Fecan won’t come to talk to you if you insist that their problem doesn’t even exist?

The CRTC has decided that a fee-for-carriage will not happen; that’s something that should please you. They have, however, decided that there is indeed value in local programming – and that you should have to pay for what you use. Sounds a little like what you want your Internet customers to do, doesn’t it? So can it with the hypocrisy already and pay for the material you provide to your customers.