CBC’s new app is a recognition that the world has changed

Good news! The CBC has discovered the internet. With an eye to the tens of thousands of “cord- cutters” who have been abandoning cable and satellite providers for online video, the corporation has begun streaming all of its live television services via an upgraded mobile and Apple TV app.

Bad news! While its online boffins may have embraced the open, unregulated, consumer- driven world of the internet, the CBC’s management is still wedded to the same old closed, regulatory, subsidy-driven model as before.

On the one hand, the CBC’s new app is a recognition that the world has changed: not just for the public broadcaster, but for broadcasters of all kinds. If advertisers are deserting them, as they are deserting us, it is also true that advertising is no longer so vital a revenue source: where once it was not possible to charge viewers directly for programming, now it is — has been for decades, actually. Similarly, while the internet makes regulation largely obsolete, it also makes it unnecessary. There aren’t five channels any more, but five hundred, or five million: as many, theoretically, as there are points in cyberspace. “Spectrum scarcity” has been abolished.

And what sort of content is likely to attract paying viewers? The kind that people value highly, that engages and absorbs them on a much deeper level than we used to associate with TV. When people talk about a “golden age” in television, that is what they are remarking upon. The good stuff, almost all of it, is on pay. For a paying audience, it turns out, is also a demanding one.

Indeed, nothing would prevent the CBC from moving its cable signal onto pay, as well. I don’t mean as a supplement to existing revenue sources, but as a replacement for them. It’s clear to just about everyone that advertising finance is fundamentally incompatible with whatever role there might still be for a public broadcaster: the kind of programming attractive to advertisers is exactly the kind readily available on the private networks. But the way to wean the CBC off advertising is not, as its CRTC submission maintains, to give it gobs more public funding ($ 400 million more, annually). It is to put it on pay: not just online, but on all its platforms.

The larger goal, then, should be for subscription fees to replace, not just advertising, but also the CBC’s public subsidy. The beneficiaries from this would not only be taxpayers, but CBC viewers: subsidy is not only no longer necessary, but an impediment to quality — the kind that, we can now see, comes from a direct relationship with a passionate, paying audience.

It would also, incidentally, result in the “level playing field” the CBC claims to want: if there is anything tilting the field these days, it is the corporation’s billion- dollar annual grant. Certainly there is no case for a “Netflix tax,” a proposal that is every bit as untenable and self- interested coming from the CBC as it is from Netflix’s private competitors. 

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