I'll make a couple of comments on what you said.
I think Canadians have a responsibility. I think we have to work on this together. It's not any one person individually. You heard from Chairman von Finckenstein, who said that the CRTC doesn't, in and of itself, have the ability to mandate this. So really, it's how we pull together.
I can tell you that when we got the rights--and we were very proud to get them--a couple of years ago, our first piece of business was to approach SRC and say, “All right, how can we distribute this on the broadest possible basis?”
We determined that the way it would have to work.... What's really important in the Olympic Games is that the exclusivity of rights have to remain with one organization, particularly the control of the advertising industry. You can't have a number of people on the street selling it. So there is a commercial aspect to this. But there's also a social responsibility that we acknowledge.
So we approached them and said what we'd like to do is mirror exactly what we did with the Montreal Canadiens. With the Montreal Canadiens, when RDS won those rights several years back and they weren't going to be available on conventional television, we went to SRC and said, “We will provide you the signal, we'll provide you our production, we'll control the commercials, but you will have the ability to put them on conventional television, on your airwaves.” And they agreed. At the end of the day it worked beautifully well. There wasn't an issue. It was accepted by the public. In fact, we were pleased with the experiment.
So there is a precedent for this.
What we did with the Olympics was to go back and ask exactly the same thing--if they would be willing to take our signal. We need to control the advertising inventory and we also need to control the production. You can't have different people producing at the Olympics. It's too big an event. It has to be coordinated. And that is where it really became a problem, because their position had changed since the time of the Montreal Canadiens. What they said was that they have to control their advertising industry. They have to control production. They want to be on-site. Basically, they wanted to be a rights holder, so to speak, without having actually purchased the rights or won the rights. That's where it really halted. We tried as recently as the end of February of this year. I think those are the two letters that the CRTC chairman talked about today.
The last communication we had with SRC at that point was that, first of all, they would still want to produce their own production, but they would cherry-pick events. They wouldn't do every event, they'd just do certain events, and they would also be able to sell the commercial inventory. That, for us, as I hope I've explained, is not something that is possible.
That is really when we decided.... We've tried three times now to come to an agreement. They didn't see our point of view, and we respect their point of view. If that's the way they feel, that's their right. But unfortunately, it doesn't leave us with the best solution to the problem.
What it leaves us with is what we're doing now. It leaves us with dealing with the cable companies for free views and making sure that we get expanded coverage on other services, like APTN. We're grateful to them for coming onboard with eight hours of Olympics a day, by the way, in the French language. And there are other things that we've put into place. All of these are helpful and they get us to the percentages that have been discussed, and they hopefully get us to where we need to be as best we can. But it's not the best solution.
At the end of the day, however, what I really want to make clear--and I made this clear to the Senate committee yesterday--is that universality is not possible. Even today, as others have pointed out here, not everyone can receive television. That's in English or in French. So it's not 100% of the population. It will always be something less. Whether it's 99%, 98%, it's in that range. That's where we are.