In a bid to increase diversity in services targeted to third-language communities in Canada, while maintaining Canadian ethnic services, the CRTC today announced a new approach to assessing requests. From now on, they will generally be approved, but any foreign service that offers programming in Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Greek or Hindi will have to be purchased by subscribers along with the corresponding analogue Canadian third-language service, i.e. Telelatino, ATN, Fairchild, Talentvision, or Odyssey.
Previously, the commission applied the same competitiveness test to all foreign services, namely that they not be partially or totally competitive with Canadian specialty or pay services.
