 They must be licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and comply with its policies, including those on the packaging of their services.Additionally, the CRTC licenses specialty channels; licensing was previously mandatory for all services, and restrictions were placed on their content in order to discourage direct competition in certain categories.The CRTC began to phase out these policies by the 2010s, and in 2012, it began exempting networks with less than 200,000 subscribers, as well as certain ethnic services not broadcasting in Canada's official or indigenous languages, from formal licensing.