Canadian Heritage committee  First of all, the commission went through a process and looked at the diversity of voices and they looked at even the combination of Corus and what is now Shaw Media. They said that between the two of them it would still fall below the 35% bright-line test. There is a perception that Corus is owned by Shaw, but it's not.

Canadian Heritage committee  This year it's $88 million.

Canadian Heritage committee  That's a great question. Even the fact that we went through this acquisition.... The scenario is that if Shaw hadn't stepped to the plate, nobody else wanted the over-the-air broadcasting system. You know, the company would have been broken up in some form. When you look at what the contributions are from the over-the-air and the production that takes place every year, and the independent producers who are actually benefiting from the fact that Global is still Global, and now in very stable hands, if you will, there are benefits that may not be recognized but they are truly tangible benefits that come from this acquisition.

Canadian Heritage committee  We offer choice to our customers, but the choice wouldn't be a tax for fee-for-carriage and a tax for ISPs. We don't want that as being the choices. We want the relationship between ourselves and our customers to be one where they look at it as having value within the system. If you took Netflix, for example, which charges $8.99 a month, it wouldn't take much to convince somebody who had a $3 or $4 value for signal, or whatever it's called, and then an ISP tax to say “This is a system I don't want to be part of.

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely.

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. We want to work with government, with CRTC, to find a way to do this within the construct of the regulations. Netflix hasn't been around for much more than a couple of months in Canada, and today 5% of our traffic on our network is dedicated to streaming movies from Netflix.

Canadian Heritage committee  We think there are always, as there are in life, reasonable positions, and we've learned to live in a structure in which we report, and we're quite happy to do that. But as an example, I think Ken mentioned that as a part of the new media broadcast distribution, we face a requirement now to fill out forms that frankly don't really provide any benefit to the system.

Canadian Heritage committee  That's correct.

Canadian Heritage committee  We just launched two services in the last two weeks—ox.tv, which is an independent specialty service, and Pet TV, which is a small independent service. By virtue of the regulations now in front of us, we have to launch 21 more unaffiliated programming services by August of this year.

Canadian Heritage committee  Bell and Telus.... Go ahead.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. If there's one message we want to leave with you today, it is that over-the-top competitors have a free ride. They're aggregators of broadcasting. They provide broadcasting services in Canada. And they aren't licensed. They're non-exempt. We think there's an element of fairness missing with respect to their ability to provide services to our customers.

Canadian Heritage committee  No, we're not. These people are broadcasting. We're saying they should be making some of the same contributions to the system that we're making. As for how we do it, I think that still has to be questioned. Every year we pay about $151 million. It's broken out into part one fees, part two fees, telecom fees, central community funds.

Canadian Heritage committee  No. They're actually available to our customers. We have perhaps 1.7 million Internet customers who can get right to Netflix. Netflix has a website. If you subscribe, you will receive access to thousands of movies for $8.99 a month, which is a low price. They are starting to get a lot of attention in Canada.

Canadian Heritage committee  No.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. One of the benefits of the acquisition--and there were many--happens to be that it will ensure that anybody who is currently viewing services using an antenna as opposed to a satellite receiver or a cable box won't be disadvantaged. We will be providing them up to $15 million worth of Star Choice receivers so that they can in fact receive those over-the-air signals via a satellite receiver.