United Breaks Guitars singer Dave Carroll joins the fight for fee-for-carriage in a video posted on YouTube. Not sure if the "LocalTVMatters" supporters recognize the irony.
The Cable Song
5 Comments
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Why?!?!
Why is anyone helping the “local” TV CEO’s line their pockets with cable subscriber’s hard-earned money? Especially artsy types like Carrol who normally claim not to watch TV anyway. Go to http://www.StopTheTVTax.ca and find out the real story.
Sick of it
I already can’t stand this commercial, it’s so bad. I don’t want to pay anymore money than I am, especially since I don’t get to choose which channels I want or not. When I have choice in the matter than come talk to me.
bob@canada.com
What is the irony? Please spell it out? You seem to have a bias on this issue.
I love it.
Tonight on the CTV Ottawa news I counted a total 5 spots from “Save Local TV”. The song once (2:51) and the other spots (about 0:30 each), for a total of nearly 5 minutes (of the 16 minutes per hour allowed) of lost advertising revenue. Perhaps if the networks put as much energy into getting advertisers as into trying to sway public opinion, they wouldn’t be losing money.
To be fair, they did air the 30 second spot from Bell, Rogers, et al, once. I assume that those guys had to pay for it…
Of course
to follow on with my previous posting, if the 3 minutes of the song didn’t come out of the advertising allocation, then why is the network using news time to push a political message? Then again, this is the network that attempted to cancel the ONLY locally produced non-news show on the network (Regional Contact); it took a major write-in campaign by the community to get them to change their minds.
And of course CTV also owns the A-Channel station in Ottawa/Pembroke, and canceled the local news casts on that channel, leaving as the only locally produced show the #1 local morning show in the Nation’s Capital (and co-incidentally, the ONLY local morning show in the Nation’s Capital).
It is simple. If the networks want fee-for-carriage, they lose mandatory carriage and prime dial placement. I expect that, in that case, the viewship will go down. If they want to reach as large an audience, they will need to spend money on transmitters. They will then ask the government to fund conversion of the analogue transmitters, in the areas that they convinced the CRTC to exempt, to digital, since the people won’t have analogue tuners…