Canada should ease the regulatory burden on traditional broadcasters to create a level playing field with less encumbered digital streaming rivals, two policy think tanks said in separate reports this week.

“While traditional broadcasters have Canadian content quotas and funding taxes imposed on them, online broadcasters enjoy a much more flexible regulatory environment,” said Steven Globerman, a Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of a report released Wednesday called “Technological Change and its Implications for Regulating Canada Television Broadcasting Sector.”

The solution is not for the federal broadcast watchdog to impose new regulations on online TV and movie content, the report says, but rather to further deregulate Canada’s traditional broadcasting industry.

“With the explosion of online content, Canadians have a plethora of choices and options now available to them. Canadians will benefit from further deregulation,” Globerman said.

On-demand digital video and audio providers are exempt from Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regulations that require licensed broadcasters to pay into a fund that subsidizes production of original domestic programming.

The streaming providers are exempt in part because they lack a physical presence in Canada, but legacy broadcasters say the regulatory pass gives so-called new media an unfair economic advantage.

Canada Media Fund and Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport officials were among several interveners at the CRTC’s Let’s Talk TV hearings in 2014 who argued that streaming services benefit from the regulatory regime and should be subject to the obligations borne by licensed providers.

Against this backdrop, Canada’s newly elected Liberal government in April announced a broadcast regulatory system overhaul that includes a lengthy public and industry consultation process.

Globerman said the review buys regulators time to better gauge the extent to which new media is supplanting traditional TV and to weigh developments in Europe, Australia and other jurisdictions that appear to be moving toward implementation of a tax on so-called “over the top” content providers.

On Wednesday the European Union proposed a quota regime that would require a fifth of digital video streamed on demand to be produced in Europe.

While Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix and other on-demand content platforms remain exempt from regulation and oversight, the CRTC has established a new hybrid licensing category to encompass services streamed over the Web but that can also be accessed as part of a subscription-based cable or satellite TV package.

The commission under chair Jean-Pierre Blais has moved to ease Canadian content regulations and allow a la carte channel selection, while stressing the need to support quality domestic productions that can be exported abroad.

But a report from the C.D. Howe Institute Wednesday said remaining production quotas and foreign ownership restrictions should be abolished altogether given the abundance of innovative digital content.

“The regulatory model for communications providers is ill-suited to current technology that allows users to access whatever they want, however they want and wherever they want,” said authors Benjamin Dachis and Daniel Schwane.

The report says “ineffective” content exhibition quotas and subsidies should be dropped and replaced with direct subsidies through general government revenues — and not through a tax on Internet subscribers.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

It also says Ottawa should roll back long-standing restrictions on foreign ownership of communications and broadcast companies.

“Removing foreign ownership rules for both spectrum and companies themselves would bring Canadian firms into a more integrated global or North American market, whether through new entry or acquisition by U.S. or other firms.”

Read more about: