I’m getting tired of the wars going on between local TV stations and carriers.
The answer is simple. Every carrier should charge a base fee for their service. (along with the obvious equipment rental charges, etc).
Then every station should be able to set it’s own cost per subscriber.
Then every subscriber should be able to select each individual channel they want with the only exception being they need to have a set percentage of Canadian stations to meet the Canadian Content requirements. For example, 4 out of every 10 stations chosen must be Canadian. (or something similar)
Then finally, for nationwide conglomerates such as CTV, they take a set percentage of their subscriber fee for paying the carriers and for covering things such as national branding, national level news, for the purchase of programming, etc. And then they can divvy up the rest to local affiliates based on the local affiliates viewership as a percentage of the national viewership.
I call this the King/Freedman model. i.e. Can’t we all just get along by letting the Free Market reign?