The terms of trade, to put it in context for the committee, is a concept that evolved in Britain. If you think of the food chain that exists in our business, you have the cable companies, the BDUs, broadcasters, independent producers, unions, and guilds. Between the unions and guilds, you have a collective bargaining relationship that governs that relationship.
At the other end of the spectrum you have the Broadcasting Act, which reulates the relationship between broadcasters and the BDUs. There's a gap there between independent producers who sell in to broadcasters.
Terms of trade are designed to deal with rights allocation. How do you deal with it appropriately? With consolidation, as Dr. Fry mentioned earlier, we've seen a great imbalance of power take place between broadcasters and the independent production sector.
Why do broadcasters call for more in-house production? It's not because they physically wish to produce it. It's because they want the rights. They want to hoover up the rights to presumably deal with this digital world, but they're not using those rights and they're not well positioned to do that.
What we're talking about in terms of trade, for one example, is to say if a broadcaster has a strategy to make use of those digital rights, they should have those rights because that's in their interest. The more the program gets out, the more successful it will be, but if they're going to take those rights, please use those rights. Use it or lose it, because if the broadcaster is only going to acquire rights to put them on the shelf, all they're trying to do is beef up their balance sheet. They have absolutely no interest in moving into the digital age.