I used to also be in the cable business and in the satellite TV business.
I think what Sylvain gave you by way of an account of the situation with respect to the Quebec marketplace and the centrality of conventional broadcasters is absolutely accurate, and he puts it very nicely when he says, “it's a little bit the canary in the mine shaft”.
What's happening in the Montreal market is what is beginning to happen now across English Canada. The issue that's before us is that if we want to maintain—it's exactly the same thing in English—strong news services, regional news services, and Canadian drama, which is very expensive, the conventional broadcasters are the ones who do it.
They find themselves in a very funny situation—by “they” I mean us and CTV and Global—which is that the specialties, whether TSN or whoever it happens to be, have access to two forms of revenue. One is with the cable companies and the satellite companies, which pay them by way of fees, and the second is advertising revenues. We've said, if it matters to the system that we continue to do drama and news and regional shows and whatnot, then we should make sure that everybody has access to the same various sources of revenue.
So we've said to the commission, absolutely, you should tell the cable companies they should pay the conventional broadcasters a fee. But we've said the fee actually has to be tied to programming commitments. It has to be tied to things you're actually going to do, not just to help out your bottom line.
We recognize that a lot of people have asked whther that will make basic rates for cable go up, so the other thing we've said we think is very important is this. Right now your basic service, if you live in Toronto, consists of over 60 channels. It's an enormous basic service on which the cable companies keep piling more and more stuff. We said, why don't we make it simple? Let's make a very small basic service that would just consist of the key Canadian services.
Right now, the funny thing is—it's a sort of irony—that if you want to buy basic cable service, they force you, essentially, to buy American channels.
So we said let's make the basic service very small, and after that people could just pick whatever they want. Then, if the service comes down from being 60 channels to 12 or 10, you can see that the price of basic will collapse and the amount of freedom consumers will have to pick whatever it is they want and to control their own cable bills will be dramatically increased. That's our proposal.