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Broadcast antennas dot a rooftop in TorontoBrian Kerrigan

Canada's satellite television providers on Tuesday responded to calls from broadcasters to carry more local television stations, telling the federal broadcast regulator they simply don't have the room for all those signals.

Executives from Bell TV and Shaw Direct, the country's two direct-to-home satellite services, told the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that raising their requirements to transmit local stations from every broadcaster in every market would take up too much capacity for them to remain competitive.

Such requirements would crowd out room on the satellites for more lucrative specialty channels and high-definition feeds, the companies argued at the hearing in Gatineau, Que.

"Discretionary [services] unfortunately, in a lot of cases, is why people choose their provider," said Bell's senior vice-president of regional products, Heather Tulk.

When the two satellite services were licensed in the mid-1990s, they were given more lenient conditions than cable companies for carrying local signals, to help them get off the ground. Combined, the two services now reach more than two million homes. Requirements for the transmission of local signals have since been increased, and next September those rules will change again. For example, satellite services will have to carry one station per province for each of the country's major broadcasters.

But the networks have argued those requirements should be higher.

"Where a local television is not carried on one or both [direct-to-home satellite]providers, it can have a detrimental impact on that station's revenues, especially in markets where DTH penetration is high," CTVglobemedia Inc.'s vice-president of regulatory affairs, Kevin Goldstein, wrote in a submission to the CRTC in September. "The ultimate goal should be carriage of all local stations in their local markets."

At the hearings on Tuesday, the example was raised of the communities of Saguenay and Trois-Rivières in Quebec, where the CRTC has received complaints that neither Bell nor Shaw carries the local CBC station.

But Shaw's senior vice-president of regulatory affairs, Jean Brazeau, argued that viewers for whom those local stations are a priority most likely don't subscribe to direct-to-home satellite services.

"We are being disadvantaged by not offering those services, because we don't have access to that customer base," he said. "…We make these hard decisions every day. If we had unlimited capacity would we serve Trois-Rivières? Of course."

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