This is a first take on today’s decision by the CRTC to approve BCE’s return to the broadcasting business (full decision here). For those with what constitutes an elephantine memory in these fast and harried times, BCE had taken CTV over once before, in 2000 and failed. It left the television business six years later. Today, it returned with the CRTC’s blessing and typical sop thrown to the Canadian ‘broadcasting system’, albeit at perhaps an even more meagre and self-serving level than usual.

The decision allows Bell Canada Enterprises a second run at making vertical integration and so-called synergies work between its telephone, satellite and ISP (i.e. network infrastructure) businesses and the largest media group in the country, with its CTV and A-channel networks, 31 satellite and cable television channels, 28 local television stations and 33 radio stations. The only things really different than 10 years ago is that BCE has dramatically scaled back its ownership stake in the Globe & Mail (the Thomson family holds the rest) and sprawling media conglomerates have, by and large, gone out of fashion since the turn-of-the 21st century.

Another important thing that should catch our eye is that the value of CTV is now less than it was a decade ago, not because the tv business has shrunk — overall it has expanded from a $5 billion industry to one worth $7 billion (adjusted for inflation) — but because the first six year’s of BCE’s tenure were pitifully poor. CTV was worth less than half its original value when BCE left in 2006. Today, and after all the growth in the industry plus the acquisition of CHUM, the combined value is about the same as CTV was ten years ago: $2.45 billion.

That number is important because it’s the one that the CRTC uses to peg the value of the contributions that BCE will have to pay into the ‘broadcast system’ in order to gain the CRTC’s blessing. At ten percent, BCE’s contribution is $245 million. Even worse, $65 million of that amount will go to directly into the pockets of Bell TV, BCE’s direct-to-home satellite provider.

The rest is for the usual content, news, drama, culture, music, etc. etc. funding — the ‘cultural industries’ sop that the CRTC requires and that company’s on the prowl exploit to line up support for their take-overs from media workers, directors of Journalism and Communication schools across the country, and so forth. The result is greater media concentration blessed by the state with a few crumbs off the table for others with a stake in the game.

Others, with broader interests can go packing. The CRTC fudges the language to conceal the fact that while vertical integration and media conglomerates are on the wane elsewhere, they’re on a tear here in Canada, despite the regulator’s supposed new rules limiting media concentration set into place in 2008.

Elsewhere, the crash in the value of the turn-of-the-21st century star of collosal-sized media conglomerates, Time Warner, wiped out nearly a quarter of a trillion in market capitalization, falling from an estimated worth of $350 billion in 2000 to $78 billion in 2009. AT&T also went belly-up in its aggressive move from the wires into all things media, only to be resurrected in 2005 when the moribund company was bought out by SBC. Vivendi Universal in France is another poster child of media conglomeration gone bad. Others examples are as easy to pile up as leaves in autumn.

But here in Canada, in a manner akin to what takes place in oligarchic capitalist societies — think Russia and South America — giant media enterprises are again on the rise. Today’s blessing of BCE’s acquisition of CTV/CHUM (A-Channel) follows last October’s approval of Shaw’s take-over of the financial wreckage that was Canwest television, and at fire-sale prices to boot!

Of course, the trend is not all in one direction. Indeed, swimming against the tide, in the U.S., Comcast’s, that country’s largest cable provider, acquisition of NBC – Universal was approved by the Dept. of Justice and FCC (but also see Commissioner Michael Copp’s scathign dissent). Besides being exceptions to the rule, it is interesting to compare the US decision approving Comcast’s take-over of NBC with the CRTC’s decision to sanction BCE’s acquisition of CTV/CHUM.

In the US, the Dept. of Justice and FCC put fairly tough demands on Comcast to make its television and film content available to Internet competitors and ‘online video providers’ (OVPs), to adhere to open Internet requirements and to “offer broadband services to low-income Americans at reduced monthly prices; and provide high-speed broadband to schools, libraries and underserved communities, among other benefits” (FCC Press Release).

The CRTC, in contrast, will look at issues of vertical integration in a future set of hearings that it intends to hold on the issue in June. Any of the other issues are not even on the table, or at least so it appears.

Well, another sad day in Canada. A great opportunity to articulate vision and to implement ideas and practices that could build one of the most open media systems in the world. Instead, at the CRTC and in Canada’s media industries, it’s business as usual.