The CRTC is currently in the midst of a review of its Tangible Benefits Policy.  This is the policy that requires purchasers of television and/or radio assets to pay a percentage of the purchase price to programs that will benefit the entire broadcasting system.  This policy was initially put in place because while there is a competitive bid process to acquire a licence in the first place, there is no such competitive process when purchasing the assets of an existing licensee.  The CRTC decided to institute the Tangible Benefits Policy to help to ensure that the prospective purchaser was the best possible purchaser (i.e. had the assets to pay the benefits package as well as the purchase price) and that the entire broadcasting system would benefit from the transaction and not just the shareholders of each entity.

Over the years tangible benefits have been assessed on a case-by-case basis but in accordance with policies and precedents that have been established.  At times this worked well and proposed benefits would fit roughly within the established practice and stakeholders would focus on the value of the transaction or aspects of the proposed programs that they wanted tweaked.  However, once the BDUs started buying the broadcasters they got aggressive with the benefits packages and we started seeing self-serving proposals and ones that had nothing to do with the policies or sometimes even the broadcasting system (see Shaw-Global and Bell-CTV (2010)).  This took up a lot of Commission staff time and stakeholder time as part of the public hearing process.   From my perspective the worst development was when purchasers started coming up with new proposals during the hearing and trying to negotiate their benefits packages at that time.  Stakeholders had to scramble to get enough of an understanding of new proposals to be able to comment on them in their presentations or reply interventions.

So the Commission is now reviewing the policy to try to streamline it so that there are very clear guidelines for how to prepare the Tangible Benefits packages.  You might be asking yourself why now when there are no big benefits packages in our future.  My response to that is – says who?  I have heard many times over the years the statement that there are no more possible acquisitions because the media consolidation process has been completed, yet acquisitions keep happening.  For example, Bell has acquired CTV twice and each time had to pay benefits.  You just never know what the future will hold. 

The Commission issued its call for comments on a proposed revised policy on October 21, 2013 and the first submissions were filed January 13, 2014.  There is a right of reply and those will be filed by January 28, 2014.  We can then expect a decision from the Commission some time in the early spring.  Note that the Call for Comments also included comments on a revised valuation policy but that gets into accounting and valuation policies that would be better left to accounting professionals to comment on.  I’m also focused here on television rather than the radio benefits policy, which is similar in concept but slightly different in the detail.

Generally the CRTC is proposing that rather than the bulk of tangible benefits being self-administered by broadcasters for their own programming, 80% would go to the CMF and the Certified Independent Production Funds (“CIPFs”) with the other 20% being discretionary (i.e. social benefits but could also go to independent production or digital media production).  The breakdown between CMF and CIPFs would be the traditional breakdown of BDU revenues between those agencies, namely 80% to CMF and 20% to CIPFs. 

The initial submissions are somewhat predictable.  All the private broadcasters are against the benefits policy to begin with.  They ignore the fundamental reason for it (lack of a competitive licensing process at that stage) and call it a ‘tax on purchasers’ (Corus) or no longer needed because there is plenty of other production financing (Rogers).  If the Commission must continue the policy then they would like to keep the current case-by-case approach since that allows the most flexibility.   For them.  [Note that the CBC is in favour of the revised Tangible Benefits Policy as it would mean that they, or their producers, would get access to funds that they do not generally have access to.]

On the other hand, the content creators who have been major beneficiaries of the Tangible Benefits policy generally support the CRTC’s proposed new policy but would like to see a variety of tweaks to the proposal.   For example, DOC would like to see a portion of the benefits go to a non-broadcast fund.  The CMF and CIPFs all require a broadcast trigger, which is generally fine except that DOC is finding that broadcasters increasingly do not want to air documentaries.  As an organization they are exploring other avenues to get to documentary-loving audiences and this proposal furthers that goal.  

Most of the content creators would like to see the split 85% on screen and 15% discretionary, consistent with past practice (though DGC would like to see it 83.33% on screen and 17.67% discretionary).  CMPA points out that the increased split will make up for the fact that as a third party fund, the CMF and CIPFs will have administrative costs that will need to be deducted (though strangely the WGC doesn’t think they should be able to deduct admin fees because the additional administration would be minimal – I don’t think they’ve been on either side of a production financing application).    

One of the arguments that a few stakeholders made to support money going to the CMF is the trend that we’ve started to see towards lower BDU revenues and therefore a drop in their contributions to the CMF.  Future benefits are seen as a way to make up for the expected growth in revenue shortfall.

There is some concern that the CMF’s funding criteria under its Contribution Agreement is much more limited than Tangible Benefits have been over the years.  The CMPA called for benefits money being spent by CMF and CIPFs consistent with the Tangible Benefits Policy rather than the Contribution Agreement or other existing criteria.  That would mean, for example, that the language split would be in accordance with the language split of the assets being acquired rather than the 2/3-1/3 of the CMF.  It would also mean that some of the categories of programming that have had access to benefits (eg. feature films and local news) but are not supported by CMF and the CIPFs, would somehow still have access.

It’ll be interesting to see the replies on January 28, 2014, if there are any.  I’m not sure that there’s really much more to say.  Many of the points of the content creators can be worked out in a more defined policy – and many of them are quite valid points in my opinion.  I don’t see the Commission agreeing with the broadcasters that the Tangible Benefits Policy should be thrown out the window or that the Commission continue with the case-by-case approach.  It was just too much work for everyone involved (well – except maybe the purchasers who seemed to be coming up with vague proposals the day they submitted their applications). The recent Corus decisions seem to have signaled that self-administered benefits have had their day.