CWA Canada: News Release: Campaign growing to save free TV signals in small-town Canada


NEWS RELEASE
Campaign growing to save free TV signals in small-town Canada
October 30, 2009 / A campaign to save over-the-air TV signals in small-town Canada will hit the airwaves and newspapers across the country this weekend to make sure people become aware that broadcasters plan to cut off access to free TV. “Forget all the noise the TV networks are making about local TV matters,” says Lise Lareau, President of the Canadian Media Guild (CMG). “The best kept secret about TV in the country is that those same networks want to cut off 11 million Canadians from free access to their local signals. We want to make sure people have the chance to stop this from happening.” OpenMedia.ca, a coalition of interest groups including the CMG and CWA Canada, is running an advocacy campaign that makes it easy for people to submit letters to the CRTC. Hundreds of people have done so and OpenMedia is hoping that thousands of Canadians do likewise. The broadcasters have argued they can’t afford to replace their existing analog transmitters with digital ones after the 2011 transition to digital TV, except in the country’s biggest TV markets. That would leave hundreds of communities without access to free TV signals and one-third of Canadians without any choice but to pay for cable or satellite to watch even their local or regional stations. So far, the broadcaster plan has been endorsed by the CRTC, which has mandated only 29 cities for free digital TV signals. However, the broadcast regulator has asked for comment on how the plan will affect Canadian TV viewers. The deadline for submissions is Monday, Nov. 2. OpenMedia believes smaller cities risk losing their local stations altogether under this plan because they would literally get lost in the 500-channel universe that all viewers would be forced to join. “It undermines our TV system and further opens up the divide between urban and rural Canadians,” says Karen Wirsig, co-ordinator of the campaign. “People in big cities and along the U.S. border are getting more – and better quality – signals than ever as free digital channels become available.” The broadcasters could share the new digital technology in smaller communities to provide more channels at a lower cost. The campaign argues that this would strengthen local and regional TV across the country. Among the regions hardest hit by the broadcaster plan are the interior of B.C., Northern and Southeastern Ontario, Cape Breton, and Newfoundland and Labrador outside of St. John’s. The campaign is running newspaper ads this weekend in St. John’s, Sydney, Kingston, Peterborough, Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury, Saskatoon, Regina and Fort MacMurray, as well as radio ads in Kingston, Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie. Since newspaper ads appeared last weekend in Kamloops and Kelowna, hundreds of people from the interior of B.C. have written to the CRTC to oppose the broadcaster plan to cut them off from free TV. More details are available on the Canadian Media Guild website (cmg.ca). One of the newspaper ads is available as a PDF file. Contact: Karen Wirsig at 416-578-1651 or karen@cmg.ca