The national broadcast regulator should ban TV providers from removing bundling discounts from customers who opt for mandated, cut-rate, basic TV service, consumer groups told hearings Thursday.
Removing the discounts amounts to discrimination and runs contrary to the intent of new rules designed to provide consumers with greater choice and flexibility in buying TV services, the Public Interest Advocacy Centre said.
“We believe practices such as the removing of the availability of bundling discounts and of certain services, including video-on-demand and free previews, subject certain basic service subscribers to an undue disadvantage, which is not justified,” PIAC executive director John Lawford told the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
“These practices deter customers from switching or subscribing to the skinny basic.”
As Lawford was testifying Thursday, CRTC chairman Jean Pierre Blais questioned why PIAC had removed a page from its website which had offered consumers comparisons of cable and satellite TV services.
“We were threatened with . . . not a lawsuit. It didn’t get that far,” Lawford told the panel, as he described letters and emails PIAC received about its website content.
Blais responded that the CRTC had received similar letters and suggested that he would welcome legal action over the regulator’s online consumer tools.
“If they want to sue us, make my day,” he said.
Consumer advocates are calling on the national broadcast regulator to prohibit television service providers from taking bundling discounts away from customers who opt for mandated, cut-rate, basic service.
The Public Interest Advocacy Centre argues that removing the discounts amounts to discrimination and runs contrary to the intent of new rules designed to provide consumers with greater choice and flexibility in buying television services.
The CRTC and consumer groups received hundreds of complaints after TV providers were mandated to offer the $25 basic packages Mar. 1.
Consumers have been disadvantaged by restrictions some of the TV providers imposed on customers who wanted to switch from more expensive channel packages, said PIAC legal counsel Alysia Lau, who argued that cable and satellite companies can’t be counted on to unilaterally change their marketing practices.
“The CRTC should impose rules that would protect consumer choice,” she said.
But CRTC chairman Jean Pierre Blais questioned why the regulator should force service providers to offer across-the-board discounts, likening the TV pricing models to the those offered by the major airlines.
The difference, Lawford said, was that the airlines charge more when they provide more services, while the TV providers were removing discounts from customers simply because they wanted to pay less for essentially the same service for which they were paying higher rates.
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