In December, Rogers Broadcasting-owned City-TV announced plans to purchase the former provincial broadcaster SCN from Bluepoint Investments. Now CBC is reporting that in its application to the CRTC to acquire the station, Rogers is asking to be relieved of Bluepoint’s committment to spend close to $2.75 million annually on independent Saskatchewan productions. Instead, Rogers promises to commit 23 per cent of SCN revenues to indie productions.
I don’t know what the dollar differential is, but the suggestion in the CBC article is that this will translate into less money for local producers. One other set of figures of note. When the government sold SCN to Bluepoint in 2010, the latter paid $350,000. The price Rogers is paying to purchase the network from Bluepoint? $3 million.
