Making Curriculum Pop

 

By Mike Gange

 

It’s a common complaint in Canada. It’s probably heard most often right after the Super Bowl, but it’s also a complaint after the Oscars or the Grammy Awards or even the baseball play-offs.

Canadians watching a show originating in the U.S, such as the Super Bowl, only get to see Canadian advertisements. The Super Bowl was carried by Fox in the U.S. and carried by CTV in Canada. Canadian viewers who tuned into Fox still got the feed from CTV, including the Canadian commercials.

This is because the broadcast regulator, CRTC, insists on Simultaneous Substitution. In 1970, nearly 80% of Canadian households received their television signals over the air, but by the end of the decade, cable distribution had surpassed over the air transmissions. As a result, CRTC developed a policy that balanced the interests of consumers with the economic interests of the broadcasters. Simultaneous Substitution requires Canadian cable systems to substitute a local TV signal in place of a distant signal if and when the two signals are identical. This allows consumers to watch world events that might not have been carried in Canada, and allows the TV station to continue to generate revenue by selling ads or TV time.

The CRTC has had a hand in shaping Canadian culture as well. In the 1970’s, the CRTC issued a policy that said if Canadian broadcasters were going to earn revenue from Canadian licensing, they should agree to play more Canadian music. The policy became known as CAN-Con, or Canadian Content, and radio and TV stations still have to comply with a 30 % CAN-Con ruling.

The CAN-Con rules encouraged Canadian bands to record in Canada, songwriters to write more from a Canadian view point, and studios to record more Canadian bands. This proved to be an economic windfall for such bands as The Guess Who, Lighthouse, Crowbar, and Rush, and for such artists as Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot and Murray McLaughlin. Even present day recording stars, such as Nickleback and Sarah McLaughlan continue to benefit from this Can-Con rule.

In 1984, the CRTC opened the doors to a concept called narrowcasting. Unlike broadcasting which has its source in the sowing of seeds in the wind by farmers and which casts as wide a net as possible for the audience that might be watching, narrowcasting targets a specific audience, such as an age group or section of the demographic. At that time, Canada’s TSN – The Sports Network – was granted a license. Its target audience was males 18 to 49, who were also sports fans and specifically sports fans who loved the big four – baseball, football, basketball and of course hockey. Rarely does TSN provide coverage of women’s sports, and rarely does it cover college sports in Canada, although TSN does purchase NCAA feeds from the U.S. network ESPN. The rationale for this last bit is that it is cheaper to buy a feed from ESPN, which sells its coverage as a revenue stream, than it is for TSN to mount up a broadcast truck, equipment and crew and send it on the road to cover Canadian university athletics.

At the same time as TSN was granted its license, another Canadian channel was also allowed to begin broadcasting. MuchMusic was not just a rehash of MTV’s broadcasts and was to have a definitive style, making it distinctly Canadian. Its target audience was 16 to 29 year olds. Advertising was deemed to be national, not local, and the new company was granted only eight minutes of ads per hour. It was allowed to broadcast on a 12-hour clock, however. If you wanted to see the exact same rotation of videos and interviews that aired at noon, you could catch them at midnight, as the broadcast was repeated exactly 12 hours later.

You can find out more from Robert Armstrong’s book, “Broadcasting Policy in Canada,” published by University of Toronto Press.

 

Mike Gange is a Canadian teacher of media studies and journalism.

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