Here are some excerpts from the second part of Robert Rabinovitch’s interview with the subscription-only news service Cartt.ca.

(Excerpts from the first part of the interview were published here Oct. 17.)

In the new publication, Rabinovitch talks to Cartt.ca publisher Greg O’Brien about transmission technology, CBC Sports, local news and the 2005 lockout.

On the need for transmitters:

One of the phenomena that’s happened since satellite’s been introduced into Canada is we always used to talk about the underserved areas in terms of channel selection as compared to the (urban) areas. If you look at the numbers – and it’s in our (TV Policy Review) presentation – the larger number of people who don’t have satellite or cable delivery are in urban areas. They’ve chosen not to get it. If you go into the hinterlands, it’s almost all now satellite or cable.

On pro sports coverage:

We are committed to stay in professional sports – for a couple of reasons. Number one: It connects the country together. We feel that’s one of our responsibilities.

Number two: It helps finance our amateur sports programming. If it wasn’t for that, I don’t know if we could afford to continue to do amateur sports, because amateur sports are not cheap. We’ve always said our philosophy is when you see an athlete at the Olympics, it won’t be the first time you saw them because we’ll have shown them already. And you know, that is quite different from what you see on the specialty sports channels.

So, we are committed to pursuing professional sports. But we’re also committed to not overpaying.

We think it’s absolutely wrong for us to compete with the private sector to win professional sports by writing a big cheque. I’d like to win these things the way we did with FIFA, where our number was, I won’t say much less, but it was less than I know the private nets bid for it.

On CBC bidding on CFL rights:

Football – you know, whether we get it or not – I’m not so certain is that important anymore. We’ll have to have the Grey Cup, but when you look at the whole schedule and alternatives, maybe it should go only on specialty channels. We’ll see what happens.

On how soon after broadcast CBC could offer shows on demand:

The answer to that is that it’s going to be “soon.” It’s going to be like (ABC has shown) Desperate Housewives, literally the next morning.

In fact, the big discussion right now, or a big discussion right now with Nielsen’s – is in counting audiences and counting eyeballs. The people who watch it the next morning or two days later or three days later, should they be counted, from an advertising point of view?

The consensus right now is to say yes for the first three days. And BBC’s way of doing it is to say “the first week you’ll have the programming for free, after that you’re going to have to pay a price for it.”

On staying in local news:

As I said at the Committee, our numbers in local news are abysmal. I can’t say it in a nicer way. So the question is should we be in local news, or should we abandon it? Right now, my operating assumption, in my working with the board is that we want to be in local news. But if we want to be in local news, we’ve got to do it well. I think that’s something the public broadcaster can do, as more and more you’re finding private broadcasters are beginning to withdraw from local news because it’s not the profit centre it once was.

On the effects of the CBC lockout:

I still think there are people who are living in the past, very few. But when I talk to staff, the lockout is not an issue. In fact, some of them joke and say “lockout or strike, you call it what you want, which they wouldn’t have done a few months ago.”

It’s not something one wants to do very regularly, but… the fact of the matter is at the end of the day, we are very satisfied with the contract that we negotiated. We think we have the flexibility to move forward, and I think if people read the contract they will see that we did quite well. And I’m not boasting because I think the employees did very well as well.

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