Source : Prince George Citizen

CKPG television is in the process of parting ways with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The station has applied to the Canadian Radio-telecommunication and Television Commission to disaffiliate from CBC by the end of August 2008, CKPG manager Ken Kilcullen said Friday.

The station will then buy content from CanWest MediaWorks but remain independently owned and operated, he stressed.

"We won't be an affiliate in the true sense we are with CBC. That is they dictate when and where our national programming can go," he said. "We'll basically pay CanWest a fee to access their programming for our station."

Kilcullen said the move was made in part to doubts CBC would be willing to renew the existing five-year contract but also because CBC has been increasing the amount of programming it is requiring affiliates to carry, which created business challenges in terms of both lower ratings and fewer minutes of advertising space that CKPG could sell.

"We used to have a mix of CBC programming that we were required to carry but we had flexibility in that we were allowed to buy other programming, in other words some U.S. programming that we could add to our schedule," Kilcullen said. "That gave us access to higher-rated programming and gave us access to all the commercial inventory that would be in those programs.

"With the CBC, our challenge was that some of the programming is low rated and also a great deal of the commercial inventory is owned by or looked after by the CBC network, so as an affiliate we would we would get only the avails open to us, not full access to the avails."

Hockey, especially during the playoffs, was a money maker even though CBC reaped most of the benefit, "but it's not just about hockey, you have to have viable programming for your local customers during all parts of the day throughout the week. You can't make one television station on one Saturday night."

CKPG's sister stations in Kamloops -- both are owned by the Jim Pattison Broadcasting Group -- made a similar move in February.

In response, Shaw Cable began carrying CBC's Vancouver station on its basic service in Kamloops and a similar move will be made in Prince George, CBC spokesman Jeff Keay said, meaning hockey fans will still get their fix.

"If the CRTC approves the application it will mean that the local cable provider will carry the full CBC channel," he said. "So actually there will be more CBC programming available to the vast majority of the people."

In Kamloops there was some controversy as a group launched a petition campaign to convince CBC to establish a transmitter to serve the five per cent of the population who still rely on rabbit ears.

It drew 15,000 signatures but was not enough to change CBC's mind, even though it had constructed a half-dozen new transmitter towers in the Okanagan in response Kelowna's CHBC, now owned by CanWest Global, disaffiliating at the same time.

© Prince George Citizen