The Chinavision Saga (a snippet)

I recently reconnected with friends from the Chinavision days. Those were the days when we were young. Those were the wild years, when we fought and didn't care if we'd win or lose. People from a generation ago knew something about the story. The media knew little but said a lot. Rumours and gossip spread from mouth to mouth. Finally, they went to sleep in the dark corners of our memories and were forgotten. I may know the most but have kept silent for good reason. In any case, I have been persuaded to write small parts of the Chinavision saga. It's about time.

In 1984, a year immortalized by George Orwell’s dystopian novel of the same name, on May 24, which was a Thursday, an average day by any stretch of the imagination, something unique happened in Canada which would change many lives. The CRTC, Canada's broadcast commission, issued a national television licence for a station to provide 100% Chinese-language programming (Decision CRTC 84-445). Even more astonishing, it was issued to a company (Chinavision) owned by a new immigrant who was not yet a Canadian citizen, who did not speak a word of English, and who had no real experience running a successful business in Canada, to say nothing of building and running a television station. His claims of having worked in television for two decades outside Canada were never corroborated and likely apocryphal. The CRTC had to take a big gamble. The Canada-US Free Trade Agreement was coming, cable television was on the rise, and American television would soon flood the country. If Canada did not establish its own media to cultivate its own identity, Canadian culture would cease to exist. In addition to Chinavision, the CRTC issued licences for Telelatino, TSN and MuchMusic, hoping to build a Canadian presence to withstand the American tide.

According to Chinavision's legal counsel, Robert Buchan, Canada's top broadcast lawyer and counsel for Rogers Cable, later Rogers Media, the decision was unprecedented in stipulating in its second paragraph: "He (Chinavision's owner) will be assisted by a broadly-based board of directors, including Peter Man who has substantial experience in the production and direction of other-language programming in Canada and who will participate actively in the operation of this undertaking." To clarify, Peter Man was at best a consultant, if not a volunteer, and had no stake or official position in Chinavision.

The rationale behind the CRTC's language was simple. Peter Man had represented and spoken on behalf of the licensee throughout the application process. For the previous four years, Peter Man had produced Chinese-language television programming on CFMT-TV (now OMNI-TV), Toronto's multilingual television station, serving Toronto's Chinese community. While two other applications competed for the licence, one from a predominantly Vancouver-based multilingual specialty television (Pay-TV) licensee known as Worldview and the other a Toronto group fronted by a video-rental shop owner, neither demonstrated it had the expertise and wherewithal to operate such a national service. Worldview was, in fact, near bankruptcy and indeed went bankrupt shortly after the Chinavision decision. The CRTC had to take the chance, hoping Chinavision’s licensee would live up to his promises and comply with the Commission's licensing conditions.

This Chinavision licence, of course, merely provided legitimacy for someone to undertake the labour and pains of creating a baby, hoping it would survive the vicissitudes of fortune and grow up to be a useful and contributing member of society. Nothing was guaranteed, and in this business, infant mortality was common. For those celebrating the win, the euphoria quickly subsided, and reality reared its ugly head.

The first sign of trouble was when promises made to the CRTC and supporters were ignored. It turned out to be an ingrained habit, to the disappointment and regret of those who backed this endeavour. Furthermore, the company lacked the capital to build and develop a successful national television service, though it had barely enough to build a façade. The vast sums needed and promised never materialized. For those of us burdened to bring the baby to this world, we would be asked to do so with precious little.

To add insult to injury, the licence was conceived with a congenital handicap. To prevent Chinavision from taking viewers from Worldview, the CRTC blocked its service from entering Vancouver (which had almost half of Chinavision's national customer base), giving Worldview time to develop a more balanced viewership with non-Chinese linguistic groups. The CRTC would consider removing this condition subject to market conditions after two years. However, Cathay, the successor company after Worldview's receivership, deliberately transformed itself into an almost exclusively Chinese-language television station in violation of its multilingual licensing conditions, hoping to establish facts on the ground and prevent Chinavision from ever entering Vancouver. The deformity we were tasked to create would be without half its limbs and could only feed from one breast.

Noticing the problems, particularly with the company’s owner, Peter Man had immediately tried to distance himself from the impending debacle. He was prepared to walk away. In the end, he agreed to stay on until he had launched the service nationally, including the all-important Vancouver market. It was more about the commitments he had made to the CRTC, the Chinese community and the project itself.

The birth pangs did not go away. The other applicant from Toronto refused to concede defeat. It sued the CRTC for having made a wrongful decision, embroiling Chinavision in multiple meaningless and costly lawsuits no one could afford. While the complainant might have had good legal arguments in an academic setting (and the CRTC acted accordingly in its future restructuring), they could never defeat the CRTC in a court of law, because it would mean ALL CRTC decisions were illegal and must be vacated. No such thing would ever happen in real life.

It was not the end of Chinavision's woes. Although he had worked in television production in Hong Kong and Toronto, Peter Man, who was not yet thirty, had no experience in building a television station from scratch nor developing a national television service on cable across Canada. He had never attended any schools on broadcasting or taken any courses on managing a TV station. He couldn't even find qualified staff to fill the various positions. In any case, the company lacked the funds to pay respectable wages or hire professional technicians. Nevertheless, despite all the difficulties, the service successfully launched in Toronto in October of 1984.

It was by no means smooth sailing henceforward. The Chinavision service was discretionary for both cable companies and their customers, meaning cable companies could refuse to carry the channel, and even if they did, their customers could choose not to subscribe. In those early days of cable TV development, the markets were highly fragmented. For the Greater Toronto Area, one had to deal with about eight cable companies. Each company, depending on its service area, could decide it did not have enough Chinese customers to justify carrying Chinavision. Until the consolidation some years later, rather than dealing with a single cable company for one city, Chinavision had to multiply its efforts by eight. It also had to multiply the cost of delivering the program signal to multiple cable companies. How could it expand its service to faraway cities with smaller Chinese communities? This made Chinavision’s problems of developing secondary markets such as Calgary and Edmonton appear insurmountable.

Life is full of surprises; someone volunteered. This young man, going by the moniker JP, was also in his twenties and, similar to Peter Man, had no idea of the difficulties he would have to overcome. JP was already a successful entrepreneur, driving around Toronto in his Porsche 911 Turbo Carrera, making noise wherever he went and seeking new challenges. He was also dating one of the owner’s daughters, a Botticellian Venus in the flower of her youth and at the peak of her transcendent beauty. JP was prepared to put his life on the line and walk through fire after having been struck by Eros's arrow. In other words, he was perfect for the job!

Hence, JP found himself alone in Calgary and Edmonton during deep winter, braving minus forty, heart aflame, guns blazing, hoping to convince the altogether icy and indifferent local cable companies about their Chinese communities' thirst for Chinese programming. The responses were always colder than the frigid snow enveloping the cities. Some of them didn't even acknowledge they had a Chinese community, at least not one significant enough to make a dent in their revenues.

JP began to call Peter Man every evening to discuss strategy and report progress. Eventually, JP succeeded, thanks to his persistence and refusal to take no for an answer, driving his cable counterparts up the wall, and Chinavision was launched in Calgary and Edmonton. Unless one understands the difficulties involved, one cannot possibly realize how monumental this achievement was. None of it would have been possible if love were not the driving force.

However, Chinavision was already short on funds, and the owner was trying to gather money from all directions, one of which, naturally, pointed toward JP. The young man had already exhausted his personal resources, including selling his Porsche, to help. The contributions quickly disappeared into an endless pit. He called his father, who had substantial property holdings, extensive investments, and myriad businesses in Hong Kong, to see if he would be interested. His father promptly flew over and met with the company’s owner. Afterwards, he told JP the truth and the bad news. The old man had the acumen not to wade into muddy waters and swim with the sharks.

As a result, JP suffered a rude awakening to the fate of his cruel forfeit. In short, the young lovestruck man had outlived his usefulness. His expenses in Calgary and Edmonton were scrutinized under a microscope, and every item was questioned. A heated altercation ensued, and dating the owner's daughter became inappropriate. JP left with a bitter taste in his mouth and barely enough money in his pocket for lunch. However, the friendship he built with Peter Man over the battles of Calgary and Edmonton remained. It would not be a complete loss.

JP made another contribution to Chinavision, which he did not know of until years later. At the time, the station's administration was highly inefficient. An easy way to solve the problem would be to use a computerized traffic system to manage the data within the television station's operations. Unfortunately, it cost about USD 100,000 per year, an amount tantamount to infinity for Chinavision. Though not educated in computer programming, Peter Man decided to take the bull by the horns and tackle the problem in his spare time. As luck would have it, he found a book on dBase IV in JP's possession and borrowed it, using the book’s examples to write a simplified traffic program for Chinavision. The original management system required a large number of staff to manually type up advertising contracts, airing schedules, airing logs and invoices. It required someone to check for errors along the way, which would take weeks to send out invoices and, hopefully, receive timely payments. Whereas, the makeshift computer-based traffic system required only one employee to handle data input and, with a press of the print button, spit out all scheduling, airing logs and invoices instantaneously, reducing staff and improving cash flow. Considering the whole thing was put together on i386 computers using DOS, Multimate and dBase IV with no WYSIWYG interface, it was almost a miracle the software worked. Peter Man gifted this system to Chinavision. It originated from JP's computer book.

Despite all odds against it, Chinavision survived, though barely, and, by the third year, following relentless siege warfare within CRTC rules and regulations, the impregnable wall around Vancouver was breached. Peter Man, taking advantage of the Calgary and Edmonton experience, successfully launched the service in Canada's major West Coast city, where a large Chinese community thrived. Moreover, with the help of Fernand Belisle, Vice Chairman of the CRTC at the time, with whom Peter Man had established a good working rapport, Chinavision was launched on Canada's Anik E satellite at a fraction of the market rate, delivering its service to many unserved communities. One might assume the baby had survived past its most dangerous stage and should be capable of developing to maturity on its own. It all came together during the last quarter of 1987. Peter Man, as agreed earlier, left the company without public announcement and, henceforth, helped only as an independent consultant.

However, the problems of malnutrition from inception festered. Lacking sufficient capital investment for a proper production facility, equipment and tape stock deteriorated badly. The company never had the funds to build or upgrade. Subscription revenues also suffered because the cable companies’ scrambling technology relied on sync suppression or inversion, which anyone with a bit of knowledge in sync signal manipulation could easily defeat. Soon, illegal descrambling boxes were sold in the backrooms of Chinatown stores for a hundred dollars a pop, mooting the need for people to pay $24 plus taxes per month to watch Chinese programming. Before the advent of digital cable TV, this problem was industry-wide, for which Chinavision had no independent solution.

Chinavision's constant financial distress created problems solvable only with significant capital investments. None would be forthcoming. Furthermore, the owner had to maintain an ostensibly opulent lifestyle for a large family accustomed to expensive tastes. The TV station was likely his only source of income, and it was never enough. As his debt piled up, frequent delinquencies resulted in penalties and disruptions in the station's operation. Soon, he would seek high-interest loans and even short-term loans with high upfront costs. Unbeknownst to the owner, he was under investigation for soliciting and receiving funds of questionable nature. A television licence is the property of the people; the licensee is only temporarily entrusted with it. In fact, all licensee funding is scrutinized, and CRTC approval is required if influence or partial control passes to a third party. Regarding Chinavision, the CRTC was notified of possible financial irregularities.

One of the biggest threats might have come from internal schism. The owner's family unity suffered from a difficult arrangement and broken promises, exacerbating the company's situation. Other misfortunes added to the misery. During Toronto’s historic real estate crash in 1990, the station had neither paid rent nor staff salaries for two months. Collapse appeared imminent. At the last minute, Chinavision received a loan to keep the ball rolling. It came from a lawyer representing a group of anonymous lenders. As the money almost immediately went down the drain with a loud sucking noise into a bottomless pit, the situation returned, in short order, to the original abysmal state. Since no new loans were forthcoming to replace the old ones, the group decided to place Chinavision under receivership.

It turned out JP was a member of the creditor group (voluntarily giving up his anonymity here), and he strongly recommended appointing Peter Man as Receiver Manager. Since the company was in dire straits and all resources were needed to save the station, the group applied for a court order appointing Peter Man as joint receiver-manager with Ernst & Young, and it was approved, averting all lawsuits. The CRTC also approved the appointment of Peter Man and promptly issued a temporary licence for the undertaking. 

At the time of the court-appointed receivership, Chinavision's monthly revenue barely covered rent. Yet, by the end of the year, monthly advertising contracts had increased twenty-fivefold. Subscription revenues also increased after the cable companies agreed to sell the Chinavision channel as part of a popular bundle to the general public. Once income and cash flow allowed, Peter Man applied to the court and the creditors to build a new production and administration facility. It was completed on time and on budget at about one-third of the cost of a professional studio built by anyone else. This was largely due to the fantastic support of a good friend, Peter Laidlaw, the VP of Imagineering, the best broadcast technology company in Canada at the time. The new studio occupied a converted warehouse at East Beaver Creek north of Toronto. Although the equipment has changed over the years, the new owner, who purchased Chinavision's assets with a high bid at the public auction, still uses this facility after thirty years. At the time of receivership, Chinavision's owner held all of its shares and was probably its only director. He ended up owning 100% of nothing.

By chance, Peter Man and JP joined forces to help Chinavision survive infancy. In a roundabout way, they came together again to save it from an early demise, giving it a chance to develop and mature under another name.

This article was written on JP's request, perhaps as a remembrance of things past. It is a long story, but it tells only a small part of the saga. Where privacy, personal secrets and confidential information are concerned, the text must afford due respect. The saga of Chinavision did not start with the CRTC licensing decision but much earlier; its retelling would take too many words. We will leave it for another day.