At least when it comes to local TV.
To get you up to speed on this, last week CTV decided that they couldn't make money with the number one TV station, A Channel Windsor, in a market of about .25 million adults 12 plus, directly adjacent to a market of 3.8 million 12 plus, Detroit. They also claim they cannot make money with other properties including the only locally licensed stations in Wingham, London, and Pembroke, Ontario. The Pembroke station has profile as a local station, repeater and all, in Ottawa/Gatineau, the number four market in Canada with a metro of about 1.0 million adults and London is a top ten market of about 400 K, 12 plus.
E!, an arm of Global, claims it cannot make money with its Hamilton station, which has repeaters all over Ontario and is ensconced in Canada's number nine market, with a 12 plus population of over half a million, a population that makes it a top 100 market in North America and so on and so and so on.
How is this so?
How can you lose money in a business that is, to quote the first Lord Thomson of Fleet, a license to print money?
Especially when you have the only game in town in a lot of towns.
Get out your clicker and play along with me.
They get greedy, they do and try to cut costs by getting rid of local programming. Contrast what Canadian stations do to what the stations in Detroit do. Local 4 and 7WXYZ and FOX2 run like a zillion hours a day of local news and make bags of money off it and it is the same in virtually every market in the States. I ask you this: how do you make more money out of your store if you close it? And when you watch the local news it is L O C A L or localized. In a lot of respects we are such a backwards nation. If the airwaves are public and TV stations are the servants of the people isn't tons of local content the way to go?
Most stations in the US are privately owned affiliates of networks, for example, CBS has 200 plus affiliates but only owns and operates 16 sticks; they pay the affiliates to run their programming, but have to be sensitive to the wants and needs of the Heartland and Dixie and the Northwest and and and so, unlike a lot of the Toronto centric CanCon crap that we try to force fee the populace [remote please] they are market driven, driven to serve their markets.
TV and radio is about getting stories out; the fact is there are not enough stations in this country. Just look across the water from Kingston, is Watertown, New York, 90 000 people 12 plus, about 2/3 the size of Kingston but, snap: 12 commercial radio stations, 5 TV stations. Kingston, one local TV station and like six or seven local radios. Heck, good old battered steel town, Hamilton, seven times the size and yet only 1 TV station, which, because of greed, instead of dominating Hamilton and making bags of money, is trying to be everything everywhere in Ontario [remember ON TV?] and ends up being a non factor everywhere. Where are the local stories being told?
When you watch Detroit, Watertown, Buffalo local TV, you see local stories and local ads. Little guys are shut out in Canada; it is go big or fold up thy tent.
Back to my fave story: A Channel in Windsor is the number one station in Essex County, which, if cleaved off from Detroit would be the about the 110th biggest market in North America and when combined with Detroit is the 10th or 11th and they cannot figure out how to make money with the number one station in a town that size? Oy vey, what about these things called commercials? Or, infomercials?
You have to spend money to make money; there are larger on air staffs in the Motor City and that talent in Detroit is making exponentially more money than talent in Toronto. T.O. is a much bigger market, but less competitive and less money and less money and less competition means less talented talent. You have the internet; listen to Toronto radio personalities and compare them to those down the 401 in Detroit. You get what you pay for.
The big danger for Canada is that TV is a reflection of the people who are consuming it; when I watch Detroit/Seattle/Buffalo TV I see those towns reflected in the local news, which is L O C A L; when I see Canadian TV it is a reflection of Toronto and how people from the Big Smoke perceive the rest of the country.
WFDS
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