Canadian Heritage committee  Mr. Brown, you've been a big supporter of your local television station and we certainly appreciate your support on that front. The A channels, as we know, do struggle. It's not a state secret. They lose money, significant money. We need to find solutions to fix that. One is hop

Canadian Heritage committee  We're still an advertising-based business. Our revenue is 100% advertising, and it's based on viewership. When people watch your channel, the advertisers come. We try to fill our schedule with programs that your viewers and your community want to watch. News, of course, is the ma

Canadian Heritage committee  You're talking about negotiating with independent producers--

Canadian Heritage committee  Okay, yes. If you watch CTV and our other channels, we have a lot of Canadian content, which we're required to put on. So we do a lot of business with independent producers, and we're going to continue to do that. With this proposed purchase by Bell, if I were an independent pr

Canadian Heritage committee  From our perspective, we're obviously very excited. There are more ownership groups today than there were seven years ago. I think today we have 63 ownership groups in the media space. If you go back 10 or 15 years, that certainly wasn't the case. What's happening is that our di

Canadian Heritage committee  I think it will be more choice; I think there will be lots more choice.

Canadian Heritage committee  You're still going to have the 500-channel universe.

Canadian Heritage committee  As I said earlier, small independent broadcasters serve their communities, where we are not. They play an important role. In Mr. Del Mastro's community, for instance, they have a local TV station. We would not normally go to that market. But it's served through the Corus family,

Canadian Heritage committee  They can only do what the act tells them to do. They have done a good job dealing with a lot of the issues that have come before them, particularly in our case, on conventional television. If you're going to look at the CRTC, I think you need to look at the act first, before you

Canadian Heritage committee  Let me be a consumer for a moment—which I am. I have an iPad, like everyone else, and I watch stuff on it. No, I think they should be excited about it. There are so many opportunities now.

Canadian Heritage committee  Mr. Del Mastro, your position is loud and clear on that, for sure. Our position is quite clearly that our troubles don't go away just because Bell bought us. They don't. We have a healthy specialty business, which obviously is very attractive to Bell. We have a fragile conventio

Canadian Heritage committee  It's not that they wanted to abandon us; they didn't see us as strategic in their vision. We had a number of shareholders. Bell was one of them. Bell had the opportunity to purchase us because they were at the table—this is all public information—so the timing was right.

Canadian Heritage committee  My position, CTV's position, has been pretty clear throughout the whole debate. And we were quite pleased when the CRTC made its decision on value-for-signal. As Mirko said, its fate now rests with the courts. For us, as a broadcaster, we've always said that we need value-for-s

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. Our shareholders were looking to exit, and Bell wanted to come in and increase their ownership with us to what it was back in 2000. We were very happy with that. So regardless of that debate, we would still have those conversations. But that debate happened.

Canadian Heritage committee  I agree with Mirko. The current media landscape is staying intact with the Shaw transaction, the Bell transaction. So there will be lots of opportunities for independent producers. In terms of the smaller independent broadcasters that are in all parts of the country, they serve