An interview with CBC CEO Robert Rabinovitch was published today in Cartt.ca, a subscription-only news service for the Canadian cable, radio, television and telecom industry.
Cartt.ca publisher Greg O’Brien asked Rabinovitch the usual questions, with ensuing discussion about funding models, CBC’s upcoming mandate review, the “grilling” before the heritage committee, ratings, and The One.
Here are some excerpts.
On the mandate review:
…we think a mandate review is called for… Because what happened (during its last license renewal) in 1999, (the CRTC) made demands upon us, and as one very senior journalist said, “yes, but how’s that going to be paid for?” the answer at the time was “well that’s not our concern.” But that’s an irresponsible answer. So if you do a mandate review with the government, the government is implicitly agreeing to either finance it or not finance it.
On carriage fees:
A fee for carriage makes sense. The question is what rate and how and whom? Our argument for the Commission has been that we believe there should be a fee for carriage of our programming and that the amount should be determined at the licensee’s hearing. That differentiates us from Global. They want a fixed 50 cents right now. We’re saying no, the fee for carriage should not be a gift; it should be for promises of performance and that should be determined as part of the license. So in our case, we would say we want the money for drama. We want to enhance our drama output, and to do that, we need, whatever the amount is.
On ratings:
From our point of view, ratings are one element of managing our schedule. It’s not the only thing so we don’t believe it should be ratings driven. I think it should be driven by, for example, the number of hours of drama that one puts on. It’s similar to what the CRTC did with the increase from 12 to 14 minutes (of ad time per hour) if you increase the number of (Cancon) hours. They didn’t get into the game of saying there’s got to be this programming or that programming.
On the reaction to bumping The National for The One:
But the reality is that’s part of living with the CBC. You live in a glass house, and what did we learn from it? You know, The National will be moved, and one of the things about putting The National on at 10 p.m. is that it will be moved for sports and has been. I remind people it used to be moved much more when we used to do Blue Jays baseball during the summertime.
On the status of the Canadian version of The One:
RR: It’s in development hell… We’re looking at it. We’ve got the rights to it but we have not made a decision.
A second part of the interview will be published next week.
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