The funding models to which CBC could have access involve changing the model for everybody who is in there, because if you decide that we have access or a different access to the Canadian media fund, you're immediately impacting everybody else who has access to that fund.
If you decide that we are going ad-free, and let's say that the public broadcaster should be going ad-free, that's $250 million to $300 million a year. We give that back to the privates and the privates then have access to those advertisers and we don't. How are you going to then allow the public broadcaster to get those dollars back in a stable way? Is it going to be a government incentive, is it going to be a tax on your television set as in the U.K., or is it going to be something on the new Internet providers so they'll have to pay some portion, as they did in Europe--in France and in Spain--a portion of some line in your P&L? All of these are available, but they involve having an open conversation and rethinking the whole of the model. This is not only a CBC/Radio-Canada situation, but is one in which we're directly involved.
When we went with the private broadcasters and sat for the first time—frankly, for the first time in our history, Mr. Williamson—with CTV and with TVA and with Rogers, we told the CRTC that this makes no sense, that value for signal is going to be important for the conventional broadcasters to live. That was a very strong signal.
Keith Pelley,who heads Rogers, was in front of the CRTC on the license renewals of Omni and of Citytv two or three weeks ago. The numbers he threw at the CRTC as to how much money they were bleeding on their conventional networks, he said, showed that this is not going to work and that the next people who were going to show up in front of the CRTC—CTV and Global—were also going to tell the CRTC that their conventional model doesn't work.
This is why this is something that needs to be addressed. As an industry, we're there, we're involved, and we're stuck in the middle. We don't have the platforms that the other broadcasters have, nor the integration that they have to support the conventional broadcaster.