Questions have been raised during this committee's review as to whether the Broadcasting Act needs to be amended to include digital content and delivery as part of the CBC's mandate, or whether it should even be in that business. As Mr. Rabinovitch has said to this committee, “At the end of the day, it's the content that counts”, not the method of delivery, or, in other words, the CBC's mandate is to create content that addresses the needs of the regions and reflects Canada back to it. The mandate does not limit how the content is to be delivered or in what format it is to be produced.
The CBC needs to be competitive with its fellow broadcasters and has a positive obligation as the public broadcaster to test the boundaries of digital content and delivery as part of the flow and exchange of cultural expression. That means distributing TV by any and all platforms, including digital, and making the back catalogue of programs available through digital distribution. While the cost of digitizing the old content is being assisted by the Department of Heritage, there is still the issue of use rights to the talent, and the CBC needs to have funding to cover that cost.
Digital platforms also mean reaching out to audience with additional content that keeps them engaged between episodes or seasons, provides them with additional information, back stories or characters, and provides them with ways to interact with the world that the program has created. We know the growing list of terms: webisodes, mobisodes, mangasodes, interactive television, interactive storytelling, ITV, and so on.
Rarely does the CBC pay for additional digital content by increasing its licence fee to producers who commission the work from screenwriters. It is absolutely wrong to ask screenwriters and other artists to subsidize the CBC by working for free, and it is unconscionable that our public broadcaster would take this position and try to make it appear reasonable. The answer to keeping pace in the digital world will not come from squeezing free work from artists such as screenwriters or refusing to pay use fees to talent. Rather, the CBC needs sufficient funding to take advantage of new opportunities that digital platforms provide, because if it doesn't, it's going to lose more of its audience and cease to be relevant.
The CBC also needs to update its infrastructure for digital and HD transmission. The FCC in the U.S. ordered the switch from analog to digital broadcast by February 2009, which means that U.S. broadcasters will only be broadcasting in digital signal after that date. This includes the ability to broadcast in HD, which will have greater penetration as households convert to digital.
Conversely, the CBC has said it will need another 10 years before it will be competitive with HD and digital production and broadcasts. It costs money to produce in HD, to license programs in HD formats, and to broadcast in HD. It is inevitable that consumers with new HD TVs will switch to U.S. channels broadcasting HD programming if they can't get what they want on the CBC. Additional moneys for HD and digital are necessary if the CBC wants to stay competitive.
As a public broadcaster, the CBC needs to reflect a diversity of voices. We think the CBC does this best when it offers the public a variety of choices: historical programs, performing art programs, comedy, regional dramas, professional sports, and local news.These are all of interest to Canadians across the country. If these are not on the CBC, many of these programs will not be anywhere else. This is why we have chosen to have a public broadcaster, but when the CBC is not adequately funded, it relies too heavily on advertising revenue and sacrifices many worthy programs in the name of ratings.
As well, it's only by being distinct that the CBC can hope to attract audiences away from other broadcasters. No matter how you look at it, the CBC is competing with every other broadcaster for their audience. The CBC share of audience has consistently fallen since 1993. While some of the drop in audience is due to the growth of specialty channels, the CBC has lost half of its audience since 1993, while the private conventionals have only lost one sixth. When an audience migrates to another channel, it takes time and a lot of programming to earn back their trust and loyalty. CBC is slowly moving in the right direction with shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie, but it is only one series in one half-hour in an entire schedule. More needs to be done to win and keep audiences.