The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 7

NEWS The Vancouver Sun. Wednesday. July 31. 1996 TV from page 1 Licence victor will take on Griffiths family for share of Lower Mainland market A new competitor in town will bring TV ad rates down, he said, and that will draw money away from radio and print advertising. Existing TV stations will be hurt, and so will other media.

Advertising aside, CanWest is hoping a strong Vancouver Island presence will persuade the CRTC it deserves a Ii: rpnrp Hp nmmivH $15 million in ini tial capital spending, 135 new jobs and news bureaus in Victoria, Campbell River, Nanaimo, Duncan, Courtenay and PortAlberni. VITV would provide a hefty 24 hours a week of local programming, "so that Virtnria ran falk tn rhp rp nf rhp TclanH cast in 15 or more languages on UHF channel 32 and add it to basic cable packages at no extra charge. During prime-time hours, the station would compete for advertising dollars with programming in English. A CRTC call for other applicants brought in Toronto heavyweights Baton Broadcasting and CHUM Manitoba's Craig Broadcast Systems, and As-pert Can West. Whoever wins the race will be moving into the turf of WIC Western International Communications, the Griffiths family company that owns Vancouver's BCTV and Victoria's CHEK, among other assets.

(Asper already has a foot in the market with U.TV in Vancouver.) Asper, who dreams of building a third national TV network, has always coveted the seven stations WIC owns in Western Canada. Griffiths patriarch Frank Griffiths Sr. always rebuffed him. Last year, after Griffiths' death, Asper began a hostile takeover bid, although he said in an interview Tuesday it wasn't meant "If this licence goes to Vancouver and takes revenue and audience out of Victoria, there will likely never be another Victoria local television Asper said. "If Victoria is licensed, the economics are such that Vancouver can be given another licence at another time.

So it's not now or never for Vancouver. But it is now or never for Victoria." It was a vintage Asper performance. At 63, there's still fire in his eyes, although his face is lined and leathery, the bags under his eyes are black, he knocks bade coffee until the moment he's due at the rostrum, and he's out on the balcony having a smoke the second he's done. The other applicants include Rogers Broadcasting, an arm of Ted Rogers' communications empire, which wants to start a multilingual TV station serving Vancouver's fast-growing ethnic communities. Rogers wants to take over the Tal-entvision Chinese-language pay-TV channel from Fairchild Holdings, broad that way.

"I always felt the two companies should be combined. I didn't intend it to be a hostile run. It turned out their management treated it that way, or the shareholders did." WIC beat off the bid. CanWest responded by applying for licences for its own stations in Alberta and now in B.C A WIC executive agreed the CanWest licensing bids worry his company, which is diversified into satellite, pay TV, radio and telecommunications but still gets 70 per cent of its revenue from television. "Yes, there is some threat to our existing revenue," said Grant Buchanan, WIC's vice-president of corporate affairs.

The pie is not going to grow dramatically simply because a new competitor shows up, so you're carving up the dollars into a bigger number of recipients." That's the point WIC made two weeks ago at CRTC hearings into Can West's Alberta applications: CanWest would be grabbing revenue from existing stations without bringing in many new benefits. Buchanan hadn't studied the Victoria application yet, but he said he expected a similar case could be made there. In an earlier interview, Buchanan predicted CanWest would focus on KVDS, die Bellingham station, which broadcasts across the border and "sucks huge numbers of dollars out of the Vancouver market." Sure enough, Asper played the Bellingham card, saying: "Twenty-five million dollars each year leaks out of this country into KVOS, Bellingham, and that's wrong. There's no jobs created by KVOS in Canada, There's no tax revenue paid by KVOS in Canada. That money should be repatriated to create jobs and opportunity to Canadians." Asper's Vancouver Island Television VTTV projects $17 million in revenue in its first year and $20 million by its third or fourth year.

The implication is that much of it would be money that now goes to KVOS. Buchanan said it's not that easy. and the rest of the Island can talk to Vic-, toria, and Vancouver Island as a distinct regional entity in Canada can talk to the rest of Canada." As for WIC, he said: "I think they've -missed the boat They obviously feel' that they can protect their existing tef ritory and prevent us from being licensed. That, of course, remains to be seen." cashing privileges. And be automatically entered in our in-store draws.

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