WTF? CRTC Chairman Says That He Never Promised You Lower Cable Bills
CRTC Chairman Jean-Pierre Blais spoke to The Globe and Mail today and had this to say on the so called “skinny” cable bundle that seems not to have gone over well with cable companies. Not to mention that consumers aren’t thrilled with how cable companies are selling this bundle:
“People may have thought, mistakenly, that the CRTC was going to reduce everybody’s cable bills – that’s not what we promised. We said we’re going to give you more choice,” Jean-Pierre Blais, chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, said in an interview.
He said the commission’s aim has been to give consumers “tools to solve their own problems,” and used a personal anecdote to drive home his point. “I myself … looked at my offerings and slimmed it down,” Mr. Blais said, after giving a speech about anti-spam legislation in Toronto on Tuesday. “Was it easy? No. … You have to keep going up the chain into [the] loyalty program. It requires effort.”
Wait. I remember writing a year ago that the CRTC made the cable companies do three things:
- They made cable companies adopt a “pick and pay” option which means that you can pick only the channels that you want and pay for them. So you don’t have to pick a bundle full of channels you don’t want anymore.
- They made cable companies offer a “basic” cable option that can be no more than $25 a month and will consist of local stations and mandatory channels, such as APTN, TVO, CPAC, educational channels and accessibility channels, with the option to include up to four American “affiliate” channels (NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox), plus PBS.
- Consumers no longer have to give 30 days notice to dump their current cable company.
Attached to that story was a statement from the CRTC that said this among other things:
More and more Canadians are watching the content they want, when they want, and on multiple devices. They are enjoying the freedom and benefits that come from living in a World of Choice.
They told us that the bundles offered by the cable and satellite companies were large, unwieldy and expensive. They expressed frustration that, in order to access a particular channel, they had to buy others that they didn’t want.
Today’s decision is all about choice and affordability.
Note the last line:
Today’s decision is all about choice and affordability.
So, yes Mr. Blais, the CRTC DID promise lower cable bills. Now you’re backtracking on it. This is precisely the reason why the CRTC needs to dumped in favor of a regulatory body that actually is effective at protecting Canadians from this sort of thing. I truly hope when Canadians clue in, they’ll start sending e-mails to the CRTC with their local MP’s copied on it demanding action on that front. Because this sort of non-sense from the CRTC is unacceptable.
December 1, 2016 at 8:45 am
[…] keep people from picking the “skinny bundle”, the CRTC made the startling comment that the point of the “skinny bundle” wasn’t to save consumers money. Instead, it was to give consumers choice. That in itself is a very illogical […]