--- Upon resuming at 1436 8914 THE CHAIRPERSON: Welcome back. 8915 Madam Secretary. 8916 MS SANTERRE: Thank you, Madam Chair. 8917 I would like to introduce the group that we will be hearing this afternoon. 8918 It is an application by Jan Pachul for a broadcasting licence to carry on an English-language low power television programming undertaking at Toronto. The new station would operate on channel 15 with a transmitter power of 476 watts. 8919 THE CHAIRPERSON: Good afternoon, Mr. Pachul. PRESENTATION 8920 MR. PACHUL: Thank you very much. I really appreciate being here. It has been a long route for us to actually show up today. 8921 I would like to start out with an AV presentation, which will be possibly ten minutes in length. The first six minutes will be a profile that was produced by CBC television two years ago during our exemption from the Broadcast Act application. It expresses a lot more than I could say in an hour. 8922 After that we have on Charlene Zacks, who did want to appear today but did not have the financial means to come to Ottawa. What we videotaped her, and you will see her message after the CBC presentation. 8923 We felt that her message is quite important, and that is the reason that we made sure she is on the tape. 8924 So without further ado, I would like to start up our tape. --- Video presentation 8925 MR. PACHUL: Thank you, Charlene. 8926 I will speak more about Charlene's speech once I talk about some of the interventions later on. 8927 One thing I would like to emphasize. So far what we have done is like an old fashioned barn raising where people in the community get together for a common cause and decide to do it. There are a lot of people that walk into the studio and say, "Well, I can't believe one person did all this." I tell people, "There is no way one person could have done this." You know, there has been a whole group of people doing this for over a five-year period, an army of volunteers. 8928 I would like to also introduce Spyro Vendouras, who has been quite instrumental in doing quite a bit of the work on Star Ray TV. He is my tower man. We put up the satellite dishes together. We have really come along way in that respect. 8929 I really don't want to go over things that you already know from reading our application and studying our application, but there is one thing that I particularly want to bring up that is not contained within the application but is published on our Web site, which is the "Star Ray TV viewers Bill of Rights." 8930 What we have done is, we have come up with the things that we consider annoying about television and various ways that we felt that we could distance ourselves from our competitors, and also other things that we considered to be within our pro-social mandate. We felt that we wanted to go past CRTC regulations in some of the concepts that we have. So I'm going to review the Star Ray Viewers Bill of Rights right now. 8931 Article 1: "It is resolved that TV is a fun activity." 8932 Now, that is one of the main reasons why I wanted to put on Charlene Zacks today, because my recollection of doing community television in the U.S. and when I was younger was that it was fun. Charlene is basically making a plea for it to be fun again. 8933 I think since Rogers has taken over all these cable systems and closed all these community access stations, community television is no longer fun. We want to express our happiness and our exuberance through our personalities and the way we present ourselves on TV. 8934 Article 2 also addresses this: "It is resolved that no `talking-down-to-you hyper personalities are allowed on Star Ray TV. We talk to you like you are our neighbour." 8935 We try to emulate that style in everything we do. Yes, we are from Toronto but we don't want to exhibit that Toronto attitude, and I'm sure everybody knows what we are talking about in that regard. 8936 Article 3: "It is resolved that Star Ray TV will not display logos or other junk on the side of the screen during programs. Our programming is so different you'll know what station you're watching without us reminding you all the time." 8937 Now, that is something that has always personally bugged me. There are several Web sites that address the fact of these logos, and they are getting uglier all the time. They are getting full colour, animated, and they are straight through the program -- for what reason I don't really know. I think somebody started this trend and everybody followed suit. 8938 This is something else that seems to bug a lot of people, especially people in our area, and this area too that watch Citytv: "It is resolved that no shaky camera work will appear on Star Ray TV. We are your eyes. Your eyes don't shake around unless you are very drunk." 8939 Now, this goes back to my classical film training. Your eyes don't zoom, they don't shake around, and we are the substitute for your eyes. We would much rather use a cut shot than use a zoom. 8940 It seems that trendy TV these days is all pan and zoom, pan and zoom, pan and zoom. There seems to be a real lack of content. In everything we want to do, we want to be content rich, where we are actually supplying people with some information. I think what is happening now is that style is triumphing over substance in television. So we want to get back to some substance in TV. 8941 Okay. Here is another one: "It is resolved that no cameras are to be used as personal props unless we use cyborgs." 8942 If you know what a cyborg is -- this is a group at the University of Toronto that decided to view the world through cameras -- they have these cameras inside their glasses, and they also filter out advertising. For instance, if they are walking down the street the camera system would filter out a billboard. 8943 What we tried to do is get away from this concept of videographer. Contrary to what Citytv says, they never started that concept. That concept was started by NY1 in New York City many years ago where they were too cheap to pay a cameraperson so they made the reporter do everything, which I think is a joke because it means that nobody does their job right. "It is resolved that Star Ray TV will not use popups or frames on the station or website. Don't they just drive you nuts?" 8944 Now if anybody reads our Web site, it reads like a book. We don't really go into this multiple column thing that a lot of people do on the Web. A lot of people advised me, "Well, that's the way to do it." But I thought, well, if the Web site reads like a book it will appeal to people that read books. 8945 There has been a movement to integrate the Internet with television by having various popups that you can push on your screen. We feel that this detracts from viewing television. If you want to watch the Internet watch the Internet. Why are you watching TV too? 8946 I don't really think the convergence is going to occur in that manner, where you are going to see a model which is like a cross between TV and the Internet. I think you are going to see TV on the Internet. I think that is the direction we are going into similar to this "icraveTV" which has just debuted in Toronto a few days ago. 8947 This we consider very important here. I think this has a lot to do with what makes Star Ray TV different. I think that this is also the reason why we have as many opposing interventions as we do, because I don't think any of our opposition like the idea that we want to air 100 per cent Canadian content during prime time. But if a station would do this, you are actually reducing your financial success, because obviously you can make a lot more money just pushing a network switch and just running a satellite feed from the U.S. It is a lot more work to produce your own programming. 8948 Also, overall, we wanted to make a statement that our programming is Canadian, so we came up with the 80 per cent figure because we did want to air some Hollywood movies. The idea behind the movies was to air them at a time when other stations are airing local content, so we would provide an alternative to news programming, because you have noticed that we have scheduled our movies at 12 noon and 11:00 p.m. and this is when all the other stations are pretty much running their news. 8949 Also, going along with the idea of diversity, we decided not to do any news programming because we felt that that was an unnecessary duplication in the market. Just about everybody does news. 8950 Personally, I really don't like the concept of news because it doesn't really provide you with any information. You just get a 15-20 second sound byte, and what does that tell you about the news? Not much. 8951 So the idea behind our "Public Forum" show was that we would cover one issue in-depth rather than giving you little snippets of the days activities. 8952 Now, here is another one that we consider rather important to our concept. "It is resolved that Star Ray TV will not air any excessively violent programming. There is a big difference between incidental violence and glorifying violence." 8953 Again, along those lines: Why do the most depraved criminals also become the most famous?" 8954 So I think that is something else that is an issue. Broadcasters have to exhibit some kind of social responsibility in this regard and I really don't see it right now. 8955 For instance, as prime example, I have seen people air this one movie called "The Money Train". There have been copycat crimes occurring in New York City. In one of the scenes I think there is somebody that takes some gasoline and throws it into a subway toll booth. Well, there were copycat crimes that occurred when that movie was in theatres in New York City. 8956 So would it be responsible to air a movie like that? I don't think so. 8957 Again going with the Star Ray concept: "In an emergency situation Star Ray TV pledges to do whatever it takes to stay on the air to help you through." 8958 We have a rather unique situation because we have a broadcast site that is away from the CN Tower. If anything happened to the CN Tower we would be it. There wouldn't be anybody else on the air. 8959 Also, we have designed our whole plant to sustain emergency operation under generator power for long periods of time. We are going to be using gasoline generators, so if worst comes worst we will just ask for donations of gas cans on the air to keep going, if we have to. 8960 We felt that that was a very important point because we don't see anybody has made any plans for any kind of emergency broadcasting or disaster broadcasting whatsoever. In the U.S. the Emergency Broadcast System is a very important part of their whole broadcast infrastructure. 8961 That is about it for the Viewers Bill of Rights. |