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Village Squire, 1980-05, Page 34P.S. Pay television , for better or worse BY KEITH ROULSTON There's a word that's not used in polite society for people who live off the earnings of women who sell their bodies for money. That word came to mind lately when the discussion of pay television started dominating the news. There's a big battle these days over who is going to get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that everybody seems to think pay television will become. Probably the ordinary citizen doesn't care much about the outcome but mass culture in Canada could hang on the ability of the Canadian Radio Television Commission and the federal government to make a good decision. Pay television it seems is on the way whether we want it or not, at least for those people who live in larger urban centres. We out in the country may have to wait a lot longer. Pay television represents a great opportunity for a development of a mass cultural - entertainment industry in Canada for the first time. Not since the days of live television broadcasting on the C.B.C. back in the fifties have we had that kind of medium in Canada, the kind that entertains Canadians and helps develop their knowledge of their own country and its people at the same time. Somewhere along the way CBC got lost in what it was doing. The coming of more film and videotaped television made it easier to import programming. The Americans in particular started spending more and more on their productions but selling them to Canadian stations for a tiny percentage of the actual production cost. Cable television came along with even more American programming than was present on the CBC and its affiliates and on the growing number of commercial tele- vision channels who made any kind of cheap Canadian programming they could to meet government content regulations while filling the rest of the prime time with American imports. Now with often 10 or 12 channels to watch on cable, the already small Canadian audience became split up even more into small audiences for any one particular channel so that advertisers found it uneconomical to support stations. Instead of getting say half the Canadian market with one network advertisement perhaps they were getting only one-fifth now. That meant they would pay less and the network would get less even though costs of producing a show continued to climb. PG. 32 VILLAGE SQUIRE/ MAY 1980 But pay television offers a different chance. Say you produce a made -for television movie. In the old days when you depended on commercial revenue such a movie virtually couldn't be made in Canada. In the U.S. they'd spend $1 million or more on a TV movie and make it back because they have a huge population and in many cases that population has fewer choices when it comes to what to watch on television. They generally have three networks and some independents. In southern Ontario many people have the choice of three Canadian networks, three American networks, two educational net- works and several independents. Anyway, a $1 million television movie in the U.S. could make money. Never in Canada. Yet iti pay television if you could get people to pay even $1 to watch the movie you would need only a million televisions tuned in to make the money back. Audiences in Canada often top one million. But will it end up that way. when Canada gets pay television? A good guess is probably not. One of the strongest bids for control of pay television is coming from the cable television companies. The cable companies want to continue the same policies they've had all along. They want to be simply distributors of programming and takers in of huge profits. Cable television is able to take free programming out of the airwaves and sell it to the public for a monthly fee. Now they want to pay a little for what they're selling but sell it for far more, and make far more in return. Bell Canada also wants a piece of the action. Then there are the CBC and the private broadcasters who also want to control the new medium. What's most likely to happen unless we see some extreme wisdom on the part of government officials is that we get a new. more powerful medium for integrating the Canadian and American cultures that costs us even more than the ones we've had. Pay television likely will end up selling American movies while they're still new. It will hit hard at already hard-hit movie theatres. It will hit hard at the small local television stations. It will do nothing for Canadian writers, actors, directors, cameramen or anybody else involved in making programming. All it will do is promote American programming more, at the expense of Canadian programming. The only dif- ference is that instead of getting Americanized for free now we'll pay some pay television operator to be Americanized. The cable operators see this as just. They see no reason why they' shouldn't be able to make a fortune without giving anything but a distribution system. Why mix nationalism with economics? I hope the government doesn't see it that way. We have a chance to produce popular Canadian programming through pay television. We have a chance to compete with American programming on a more or less equal footing for a change. We have the talent to do it. I happen to know a lot of writers, directors and actors who have proven in theatre that they can produce things that people will pay to see. They just need to be given an equal chance to do it on film. The right decision will give them that chance. It will give us too the chance to create more jobs in Canada and to see ourselves reflected on the screen. The wrong decision will fill somebody's pockets while selling us down the drain culturally. I hope the right decision gets made. VILLAGE SQU I RE CORRECTION A cutline in last month's Village Squire article Say Cheese should have read Corry Dear, the Say Cheese restaurant manager and Mies Graham, manager of the cheese shop, cut a slice of imported cheese for one of the shop's customers. The Village Squire wishes to apologize for any inconvenience caused by the cutline error. 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