The champagne corks are popping at CHCH in Hamilton.
The local TV station, recently purchased for $12 by Channel Zero, has seen its supper-hour newscast become highly competitive this fall in nearby Toronto, the country's biggest and most lucrative advertising market.
According to BBM Canada, CTV's 6 p.m. newscast led all comers from Aug. 31 to Nov. 15 in total (2+) viewers with 283,000 on average, while CHCH has fought a three-horse race for second place with Citytv Toronto and Global Television.
City averaged 134,000 viewers, followed by Global with 120,000 and CHCH with 115,000 viewers, BBM Canada reports.
Producers called on the CRTC to put the brakes on foreign programming spending -- echoing sentiments by cable and satellite companies -- and said Thursday that over-the-air broadcasters would be better served focusing on Canadian content as a viable business opportunity.
Despite challenges, conventional television "still has lots of life in it," the producers group declared at the commission's continuing hearings into fee-for-carriage, noting that new Portable People Meters show higher audiences than previously thought for OTAs.
"Sky-high expenditures on foreign programming are a big part of the problem in the English-language market. Any business that grows spending more than its revenues is walking on a tightrope," said CFTPA president and CEO Norm Bolen in his opening remarks, pointing out that private conventional broadcasters spent 7.4% more on foreign programming, while revenues decreased by 1.5% in 2008.
The CFTPA put forth solutions it says will improve the financial health of over-the-air television, including an introduction of CPE or Canadian programming expenditure obligations -- maintaining that the model works for specialty channels which generate audiences and derive profit from their homegrown shows.
A business that stands in bankruptcy got up today and showed a lot of the reason why they got there.
"I used to think I knew
What I was fighting for.
I don't think that anymore."
After devoting most of his energy in recent years to feature films and cable, the writer, director and producer Larry Charles is returning to network television. Mr. Charles, left, who wrote many episodes for the NBC hit series “Seinfeld” and “Mad About You” in the 1990s, is to write and direct the pilot of an as-yet-unnamed series for NBC. In this decade Mr. Charles has directed Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” and “Brüno” films, and also directed, produced or written episodes for the HBO hit series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Entourage.” The new NBC show is to have an ensemble cast and be set in a small town. Mr. Charles told The Hollywood Reporter that the show would try to depict “contemporary American life through the prism of a do-it-yourself homemade aesthetic that will mix mediums.”
Malcolm MacRury (the rich ZOS, Deadwood) is the Creator for this series about an insurance adjuster with deep dark secrets. Diane over at Tv,Eh? had a roundup of some pre-press articles.Malcolm was a guest at a recent Writers Watching TV screening in Toronto and he talked at length about the genesis of the series and the writing process that drives it.
The entire discussion was recorded and is now available as the second in the Writers Talking TV podcast series. Download it from theWGC site or iTunes. Or just click here and listen now.
ONE OF THE big arguments of history is what drives human history more -- great events or great people. It's a fascinating argument. But an equally interesting little eddy is how critical mass is achieved for an idea. When Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point, he sort of put into words something that most of us sensed, or knew from our own lives. We're taught that things change slowly. But they don't. Not really. Things kind of tend to stay the same, and then something happens and suddenly there's a critical mass and whooosh, change happens faster than you could possibly imagine. Since the lightning was now crackling the radio so much it was unlistenable and local television was in news hour mode, I went back to the TV to find out what was happening. I learned that the Lockerbie bomber had been released, the Prime Minister was enjoying his trip through the Arctic and Hurricane Bill was threatening Bermuda. Nothing about what was happening right outside my window and less than 30 clicks from where these broadcasts were originating. To be sure, there had been a mention of Durham, where the first Tornado had hit an hour earlier and that there were “suspected” touch downs of funnel clouds in Vaughn and my hometown of Newmarket. But no details. No raw video from a courageous videographer. No field reporters ducking flying cows. In the centralized model of Canadian local TV I’d predictedmonths ago but never thought might ever personally affect me, the two million people who live just beyond the Greater Toronto Area had no television service addressing the imminent threat they all faced. Instead, I was treated to the same pre-packaged news segments, the same smiling meat puppets and the same banal “Sparky, what the heck’s happened to my Blue Jays?” banter.
