Ben Myers: The website

Starlight is asking the CRTC to force all cable subscribers (regardless of whether they use Bell or Rogers or... wait, that’s all of them) to fork over 45 cents per month and force the channel into every cable package, as well as indirectly support new Canadian features through a fund created by the channel. Dinsmore and Rogers oppose the application saying that Canadians have access to hundreds of Canadian feature films through Rogers On Demand.

Inside baseball

If they were politicians, Parliament Hill journalists would have called the Lantos-Dinsmore panel ‘inside baseball’; a discussion that has little meaning, relevance, or impact on a person who can’t directly benefit from the outcome of the debate. In other words, a conversation solely for telecom policy nerds.

Back to my conversation: We weren’t speaking the same language because I was measuring the channel’s success in terms of viewers, while Red’s measure of success didn’t go any further than government approval. And that’s the end of the debate.

All Starlight has to do is convince the government to force Rogers and Bell to mandate that customers pay for its channel. Then, it would get its funding ($40-million per year) and Canadians would have access to Canadian feature films around the clock – whether they want it or not.

Red said that 45 cents wasn’t very much to ask consumers. I agreed. I asserted that viewers are moving to convenient Netflix, iTunes, and forms of on-demand content. Appointment-viewing (watching shows that begin at a particular time) was going the way of the dodo and a channel that launches in 2013 needs to anticipate changing viewer habits and be a part of the new wave, not the old one.

How many people will watch?

The sad fact is that Starlight’s success has everything to do with the CRTC and Rogers and Bell and very little to do with how many people find this (mandated and prepaid) service useful after the closed-door decision is made.

It’s hard to fault Starlight for the path they have chosen. In the Canadian telecom landscape, the only way around (in other words “to coerce”) Rogers and Bell is through the CRTC (just ask SUN TV who are asking for 18 cents per month per subscriber). That’s the only way that Starlight could exist as a TV channel, and that’s the only way Canadians could access their homegrown feature films.

I think that Starlight would do better partnering with Netflix, or as a subsidized iTunes subscription, or a similar online package. Red thought $5.40 per year wasn’t too much to ask consumers to bring them Canadian content that they don’t yet know they want.

What do consumers think? A token CRTC feedback process was closed in late February. Ultimately, it will come down to Lantos vs Dinsmore Round 2, and that’s better Canadian drama than you would find on Rogers On Demand most nights. Would Canadians watch that feature? Neither Red, Lantos nor Dinsmore need worry about that part.