Quiz question… Who recently wrote about Radio-Canada: “There are always many limits to stretching the rubber band! “, “We must straighten the bar immediately” and also: “It must stop”?
Is it:
A – A naughty columnist of the Quebecor empire or…
B – A nice columnist from The Press ?
It is well and truly in the NPO to The Press that we were able to read, on February 11, a virulent editorial entitled Pay twice for Radio-Canada.
It must be because of the double funding of tou.tv’s Extra.
ICI Tou.tv is an entertainment web television offering a video-on-demand experience offered by Radio-Canada and some twenty partner broadcasters and producers. It is the largest French-language entertainment web TV in Canada.
tou.tv scandalizes a lot of people in the media.
PAY FOR THE GUY AND THE GIRL
On March 9, all French-speaking Canadians will be able to watch the new version of A boy a girl. In fact… not ALL fans of the cult series. Only those willing to shell out $6.99 a month for the Tou.tv Extra.
Marc Pichette, communications at Radio-Canada, was unable last Friday to tell me when the series would be available for free on general TV.
You will say to me: “It makes no sense that we pay twice for the same content. We already pay for it with our taxes! “. And you would be right.
In fact, you already fund all Radio-Canada productions, through your taxes, out of federal funding of $1.5 billion a year.
Paying a subscription to have access to a production that you have already financed is the equivalent of paying once for a cake at the pastry shop and paying a second time for the right to eat it.
It is this injustice that the editorialist of The Press denounced (and which Guy Fournier and I have been denouncing for years).
But he went even further: “We have to straighten the bar right away, because the public broadcaster is in the process of adopting other bad digital business habits. We broadcast ads on OHdio, whereas there are no ads on traditional radio. We do advertising content (texts, podcasts, TV shows) with Tandem. All this does not respect the spirit of the mandate.
In exchange for a few advertising dollars, Radio-Canada is in the process of losing an important part of its identity in digital technology: free content. It must stop. »
WELCOME TO THE CLUB!
Last Thursday, the day the cuts to Quebecor were announced, here is what Marc-François Bernier, professor of journalism (ethics, deontology, sociology) at the University of Ottawa, wrote on his social media: “Radio- Canada competes unfairly with all the private media (print, radio, TV and Internet) against which it competes for advertising revenue on its various platforms. This should be settled one day… My point does not just concern Quebecor, but above all the competition of a largely subsidized state corporation (which is perhaps too dispersed?) with private media and cooperatives for income limited advertising (on the air and on the Internet)”.
Dear Mr. Bernier, you are right, “we should settle that one day”. Dear editorial writer of The Pressyou are right, “it must stop”.
I am very happy that you also denounce what I write regularly in The newspaper. It was time.
