Category Archives: Media

| Radio

CRTC validates Quebecor’s QUB Radio loophole

Quebecor’s QUB Radio can stay on FM radio in Montreal.

On Friday, the CRTC finally issued a ruling on a joint complaint from Cogeco and Bell Media against an arrangement whereby CJPX-FM 99.5, the Montreal station that once broadcast classical music, then tried a pop music format, now outsources its programming for 12 hours a day weekdays to Quebecor’s QUB Radio.

In the ruling, the CRTC finds that the station, owned by Quebec City-based Leclerc Communication, does not give Quebecor de facto control over the station and does not violate a cross-media ownership policy. And so it can continue.

Cogeco, which went so far as to begin court proceedings to force the CRTC to rule on its complaint, arguing the commission was taking too long, wasn’t happy about the final ruling, even issuing a press release denouncing it.

But as I said a year ago, this ruling should have been expected, because the letter of the law, if maybe not the spirit, is being respected.

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| Canadiens, TV

TSN and RDS will keep the Canadiens for a few more years

We were expecting some big changes to NHL TV rights deals after the Rogers 12-year deal expired in 2026. As it turns out, less and less is set to change.

On Friday, Bell Media announced a renewal of a regional rights deal between TSN and RDS and the Montreal Canadiens, which will see them continue to broadcast regular-season games “for years to come.”

The announcement didn’t say how many years, or how much will be paid, so it gets added to an annoyingly long list of rights deals whose expiry dates are unknown.

Under the deal, which starts with the 2026-27 season, TSN will get 50 games a season, the same as it does now (but in an 84-game season, that means two more national games for Sportsnet). But RDS will get only 45 games, down from the current 60.

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| TV

CTV News Montreal moves to virtual set

CTV Montreal’s new virtual set.

Starting Monday, CTV News Montreal looks a lot more flashy … and a little more fake.

The station, which has been operating out of the Bell campus on Nuns’ Island since a water main break flooded its studio in August 2024, launched a new virtual set, in which the anchor sits at a desk in a green room and the background is digitally added during the broadcast.

It’s a first for CTV, though Global Montreal has been doing the same since 2008, and plenty of TV stations with big and small budgets have embraced the green-screen virtual set model.

The advantage is flexibility — you can create new sets, change them on the fly, incorporate dynamic elements. The limit is your imagination and digital artist budget.

The disadvantage, besides the feeling that you’re presenting something fake to viewers, is that despite the advances in the technology, it still doesn’t look 100% polished. You can still see edges that are a bit too sharp, things in perfect focus when they should be slightly beyond the depth of field, unnatural brightness and contrast.

But for CTV Montreal, it’s an understandable move. Things were extremely chaotic in those first days after the move, with cables lining the floors of makeshift studios, shared between CTV and RDS, where one team would have to keep quiet if the other was on the air. Probably the biggest benefit of this new set isn’t so much the green screen, but just being in their own room. (Except it’s not really their own room, the studio is shared with Noovo’s nightly debate show Les Débatteurs.)

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| TV

Children’s TV massacre: Family Channel, ABC Spark, Nickelodeon, Chaîne Disney, Disney XD, Disney Jr., Family Jr., WildBrainTV, Télémagino all to be shut down

In a matter of weeks, the number of specialty television channels in Canada for children is going to drop dramatically.

Earlier this summer, Corus began telling distributors it planned to shut down ABC Spark, Nickelodeon, La Chaîne Disney, Disney XD and Disney Jr., effective Sept. 1. While it’s not a complete pullout of children’s TV — it will keep Cartoon Network, Boomerang, the English Disney Channel, Treehouse and YTV — it’s a major cutback, driven by the broadcasting company’s dire financial situation.

Then on Monday, WildBrain informed its investors that it was pulling out of regulated Canadian TV completely, shutting down Family Channel, Family Jr., WildBrainTV (formerly Family CHRGD) and Télémagino, 37 years after the original Family Channel launched. (No date has been set, but it will happen “in the coming months.”)

In their case, the move was driven mainly by the fact that both Bell and Rogers chose to drop the services, and WildBrain was unsuccessful in getting the CRTC to rule that they had subjected them to unfair treatment. The result of these decisions was a failure of its planned sale of two thirds of its TV assets to a company called IoM Media Ventures.

Outside of the public broadcasters like CBC and foreign streaming services, Corus and WildBrain were responsible for just about all English-language children’s TV in Canada.

Neither Corus nor WildBrain is required to provide full public info on specialty channel financials in their CRTC reports, but what we do know is:

  • ABC Spark saw its revenues drop from $15.9 million in 2020 to $7.5 million in 2024, and despite an 18% cut in programming expenses last year, it continued to lose money
  • Boomerang’s revenues dropped from $2.4 million in 2020 to $1.5 million in 2024, which was less than half its programming costs alone
  • Disney Jr. saw its revenues decline an average of 8% a year, while its programming costs increased 28% a year
  • Disney XD saw its revenues decline an average of 10% a year
  • La Chaîne Disney was losing an average of 18% a year in revenues
  • Nickelodeon was seeing average revenue declines of 12% a year and spent more in programming than it got in total revenue despite a 37.5% cut in its programming budget in 2022-23

Based on their CRTC returns for 2023-24, these nine channels invested $11.1 million in Canadian programming that year. That’s a small fraction of the $387 million spent on Canadian children’s programming that year across the industry, but when it was described as a “crisis” even before these cuts, you can imagine how they feel about it now.

| TV

Global News shuts down Quebec City bureau

Staffing the National Assembly has been a challenge for Quebec English-language media for many years. It’s in Quebec City, and that market doesn’t have local English-language media beyond community media, the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph and a small CBC Radio station. So generally the journalists work for Montreal-based media as a satellite bureau.

Because Quebec City doesn’t have a large English-speaking community, journalists are generally imported from Montreal. And for personal reasons, many don’t want to move. So even if you have the budget, it can be hard to find someone qualified who wants to do it. The result is a lot of young journalists, or people who will spend a few months or a few years there before moving back.

And it’s not cheap. Besides the costs of office space (which aren’t astronomical thanks to a de facto subsidy of the press gallery building by the Quebec government) and the logistics of having a remote office, there’s travel costs and other headaches.

On top of that, the major private English-language media outlets can’t share those costs among their peers, because their only TV, radio or print outlet is in Montreal. And to make matters worse, it’s not like they get some of that money back during election time, because the parties aren’t interested in advertising to Quebec anglos whose votes are pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Still, newsroom managers have tried their best to keep those bureaus open, because they know how important covering Quebec politics is to their audience.

This week, that struggle was lost for one of those news outlets. Global News shut down its Quebec City bureau, laying off its journalist there, Franca Mignacca, who had recently graduated to videojournalist after Global stopped employing a cameraman there.

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| Montreal, Radio

TTP Media is dead, AM radio stations get approval for sale

From left: Paul Tietolman, Nicolas Tétrault and Rajiv Pancholy, partners in 7954689 Canada Inc., aka Tietolman-Tétrault-Pancholy Media, in 2011.

Paul Tietolman, Nicolas Tétrault and Rajiv Pancholy came on the scene a decade and a half ago and promised to revolutionize AM radio in Montreal. The critics were skeptical, saying their pie-in-the-sky dreams weren’t realistic and their promised radio stations either wouldn’t materialize the way they promised or wouldn’t succeed financially if they did.

Those critics were right.

This week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission approved the sale of their company, 7954689 Canada Inc. (TTP Media), to Ronald Richards Realty Inc., for a total value of about $822,000.

While the stations they promised are on the air — CFQR 600 AM in English and CFNV 940 AM in French — they aren’t nearly what the group had promised in 2011.

Here’s what led to this.

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| Opinion, TV

The CRTC puts another patch on its mess of broken policies to keep local TV alive

Is the CRTC biased?

Is it captured by the telecom industry? Is it too inclined to bow to the demands of special interest groups? Is it too consumer-focused? Is it too liberal? Too conservative? Too bureaucratic? Too arbitrary? Too micromanaging?

The answer to all these questions is yes. Or at least very good arguments can be made for each of these, and some very good arguments can be made that on the whole, it tries its best to balance competing interests.

But one way the commission shows bias that really gets me is its deference to the status quo, how it will bend over backwards to keep things the way they are, to keep everyone happy, to resist changes in business models that might threaten industries.

That instinct isn’t all bad. The Canadian broadcasting system needs supports, and a well-regulated system is better than a chaotic one that can’t sustain itself or its many jobs.

But the desperation to prop up failing business models leads to some very inelegant policies that have glaring holes in them. And the way the CRTC subsidizes local television is a prime example of that.

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| TV

Rogers extends its NHL deal by another 12 years: What we know and don’t

On Wednesday, Rogers officially confirmed what had first been reported by the specialty publication Sportico: It has renewed its national television rights deal with the National Hockey League for 12 years, from 2026 to 2038, at a cost of $11 billion Canadian ($7.7 billion U.S.).

The deal is similar to the existing one: National rights to NHL television broadcasts in Canada, in all languages and on all platforms, including special events and all playoff games, and out-of-market rights. Like it did in 2013, Rogers promises more national games and fewer regional blackouts, though exactly how many is still unclear.

It also retains the rights to sublicense its rights to others. Currently all French-language TV rights are sublicensed to Quebecor’s TVA Sports, and Monday night national games are sublicensed to Amazon Prime Video. Rogers also has a partnership with CBC to allow Rogers to use CBC Television on Saturday nights and during the playoffs in exchange for Rogers retaining all ad revenue and programming control.

A press conference on Wednesday (which you can see here) clarified a few matters. Based on that, here’s what we know, what we don’t know, what’s likely and what’s possible:

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| Media, Photos

The alternative St. Patrick’s Parade awards

Sunday was the annual St. Patrick’s Parade. While most people stand and watch the fun floats and pipe bands and dance troupes, officials at the reviewing stand near the end of the parade take notes so they can hand out awards later.

That’s great and all, but I don’t care about which is the best media entry (it’s CHOM, they have a live band, though Virgin gets an honourable mention for the Pink Pony Club theme). So here are some alternative awards from the media personalities who walked and waved through downtown:

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| Radio

Michel Mathieu, the radio guy

Michel Mathieu with K103’s transmitter in 2014.

Broadcasting is full of characters, most of whom are in front of a camera or microphone, or maybe in sales. As someone who follows the CRTC closely, I get exposed to more of the boring types, the ones who speak in legalese when they’re submitting filings to the regulator, always polite and formal.

Michel Mathieu was different. For years after everyone had moved to electronic filings, Mathieu was still filing handwritten documents to the CRTC by fax. While the highly-paid consultants were making bank off the major broadcasters, producing flashy extensive reports, Mathieu was working for the little guy, helping campus and community radio stations get on the air and upgrade their facilities.

Even just in the Montreal area, I don’t think I can come up with a complete list of radio stations he has had some hand in. K103 in Kahnawake, the Kanesatake community station at 101.7, CJLO 1690 at Concordia, CJLV 1570 in Laval, CFNJ in St-Gabriel-de-Brandon, CJVD-FM in Vaudreuil, Radio Humsafar 1610, CPAM 1410 AM. He’s consulted for all of them at some point, and more.

He brought the call letters CJMS back to the area, getting a licence for what would then become 1040 AM in St-Constant — it fell into some hot water with the regulator after he sold a controlling stake in the station, and then made the case to the commission that its licence should be pulled, which it eventually was.

His contributions weren’t just on paper. When K103 moved to its new building in 2014, Mathieu set up the broadcasting facilities, including a series of physical relays to switch between microphones, something few others would dare to even try nowadays.

Mathieu was also very vocal about his opinions. He didn’t hold back when he thought other broadcasters weren’t doing what he thought was right. Whether defending his clients or just the broadcasting system as a whole, he repeatedly intervened with the CRTC or just vented to me and others.

We had various discussions over the years about broadcast engineering, about things that could be done to improve the industry. One of the topics I’ve had on the back burner for a while is expanding access to the FM band in large cities by opening up the 76-88 MHz band previously used for VHF television channels, and allowing second-adjacent channels (existing stations have a de facto veto on these channels two spots away from their signals, which is why we don’t have stations at 96.5 or 98.1 in Montreal, for example). He agreed with the ideas and promised to tell me more about ways to reform the band next time we talked.

Unfortunately I won’t get that chance to pick his brain. Michel Mathieu died Feb. 20. He leaves behind various family members, people he worked with, and a legacy of community radio stations he helped get on the air and stay there.

Syd Gaspé, who has spearheaded the return and upgrades to the Kanesatake station, credited Mathieu as a mentor in a Facebook post this week. Mathieu also spoke highly of Gaspé and the work he has done in the Mohawk community.

A memorial for Mathieu will be held Sunday, March 2 at 2 p.m. at 2159 boul. St Martin Est in Laval. His family has invited people in the radio sphere (both professional and ham radio, as he was also a ham operator) to share their stories about him there.

| TV

The great Canadian specialty TV shuffle begins, but it’s not going well for you

It’s New Year’s Eve. In a matter of hours, a great realignment takes place as Canadian rights to U.S. specialty TV brands owned by Warner Bros. Discovery change from Bell and Corus to Rogers.

We’ve known about this change for more than six months now, and yet we still have many unanswered questions, including whether you’ll be able to watch HGTV and Food Network content if you’re not a Rogers cable subscriber.

So here’s what we do know:

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| Media, Radio, TV

How your media is changing this fall

Welcome back to the school year. There’s been some changes announced in media locally and nationally. Here’s a snapshot of things that have recently changed or will in the coming weeks and months.

Radio

99.5 is now QUB (kinda)

The station formerly known as WKND has replaced its daytime schedule with content from Quebecor’s QUB Radio, and is airing rock music on evenings and weekends. People who like the WKND format can tune in to the station’s HD Radio sub-channel, which rebroadcasts WKND 91.9 in Quebec City.

The new 98.5

At the same time as 99.5 adds talk radio, the talk leader in the city has a new lineup. Paul Arcand, the most listened-to morning man in the country sometimes, has moved on to other things (though he’s still getting up way early and reading the news) and Patrick Lagacé has been promoted to the morning show, news first announced a year and a half ago. Marie-Ève Tremblay takes over late mornings, and Philippe Cantin (also of La Presse) takes over Lagacé’s old spot on afternoons. While the host chairs have been shuffled, the vibe is the same, with most of the same collaborators, though there is a bit of bad blood.

Lee Haberkorn joins The Beat’s morning show

Suspiciously six months after he left Virgin Radio to spend more time with his family, Lee Haberkorn has joined the morning show at competitor The Beat, with Mark Bergman, Kim Kieran an Claudia Marques. He fills the hole left by the departure of Stuntman Sam in December.

Chantal Desjardins takes a break from CHOM

Though she had been absent for a while, Chantal Desjardins made it official that she was “stepping back” from her role as co-host of CHOM’s morning show as she focuses on building a family. Her second child is on the way.

Tony Marinaro in French

The man once known as Tony in LaSalle has completed his transition to the other language and has relaunched his Forum midday show in French on BPM Sports, 91.9 in Montreal, 100.9 in Quebec City and 96.5 in Gatineau.

TV people on the radio now

In case you missed it in the spring, Frank Cavallaro took over as morning man at Lite 106.7 in Hudson/St-Lazare, filling the job formerly held by Ted Bird, while Mose Persico, formerly of CTV Montreal, started a show on Mike FM 105.1.

Other moves

Changes elsewhere in Canada

TV

The Great Specialty Brand Shift

The announcement from Rogers that it had signed new deals with Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal is going to radically change Canadian specialty channels over the coming months, with some details still unclear due to a legal dispute.

The first impacts have already been felt:

  • Corus, which lost the rights to brands like HGTV and Food Network, has already pulled the plug on the Canadian version of the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
  • Rogers has rebranded OLN as Bravo, putting its deal with NBCUniversal into place.

In the new year, assuming Corus and Bell don’t succeed in blocking it, Rogers will take over as the Canadian rights holder to HGTV, Food Network, Cooking Channel, Magnolia Network, Discovery Channel, Discovery Science, Animal Planet and related brands. What happens to the Canadian specialty channels with those brands currently is up in the air, though Corus has said it plans to keep its channels running.

UPDATE: Corus has announced it is rebranding Food Network as Flavour Network and HGTV as Home Network as of Dec. 30.

Rogers, meanwhile, has announced that it will launch linear TV channels for HGTV, Food Network, Discovery, Discovery ID and Magnolia in addition to rebranding OLN as Bravo. That leaves Cooking, OWN, Motor Trend, Animal Planet and Discovery Science whose content will only be available online on Citytv+ in Canada.

Cuts at Global News

The loss of Warner/Discovery brands to Rogers was just the latest in a string of bad news facing Corus, which is struggling to stay alive after Shaw was sold (also to Rogers) and it lost millions in regular cross-subsidies. It’s renegotiating debt and a staff rationalization plan that hopes to cut a quarter of positions has meant a series of layoffs at Global News across the country.

The most visible cut is Kim Sullivan, who did weather at 11pm for Montreal and the Maritimes. But the online desks have been slashed and longtime Montreal station manager Karen Macdonald retired in the spring.

Meanwhile, Global Kingston has essentially ceased to be its own station, with 95% of its staff laid off. And Global has decided not to order any more seasons of Big Brother Canada. More than 100 people have been laid off by the company so far.

CTV Montreal backup plan

A water main break near the Jacques-Cartier Bridge flooded the basement of the Bell Media building housing CTV, RDS and Noovo studios, forcing them to move off-site while things are cleaned up and rebuilt. They lost vehicles and camera equipment and access to their studios, so they moved in to Bell’s campus on Nuns’ Island, where they’ve been operating from ever since.

After being able to manage only short pre-recorded newscasts in the days after the flood, CTV Montreal is back to its regular schedule of 5pm, 6pm and 11:30pm newscasts. (Noon newscasts were cancelled in budget cuts in February.)

But the anchors will have an unfamiliar backdrop until they can get back to their usual studio.

Quebecor merges Club Illico and Vrai

Videotron is merging its two streaming services into one — or more accurately folding its nonfiction service Vrai into Club Illico, which will be renamed Illico+. Each service costs $15/month nominally but various discounts are offered for Videotron subscribers. This is mostly a recognition that trying to sell people on two separate subscription services when there are already so many streaming services out there was a losing battle.

The new APTN

APTN has implemented its new two-channel system, replacing the somewhat confusing East/West/North/HD system with APTN and APTN Languages, the latter with at least 100 hours a week of programming in Indigenous languages. The change also comes with a hike of its mandatory per-subscriber fee, to $0.38 per month from $0.35.

Other changes

Print

Saltwire is now Postmedia

My employer has closed a deal to acquire the assets of the bankrupt Saltwire Network for $1 million. The Atlantic Canada print media assets include the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, St. John’s Telegram, PEI Guardian and others. The Telegram has been turned into a print weekly, and it’s still unclear how many of its employees will remain on the job in the long run.

Other changes

| TV

Corus’s Slice picks up Canadian rights to The Daily Show

Jon Stewart is coming back to Canadian television.

Corus announced Tuesday morning that its lifestyle and fashion specialty channel Slice will be airing The Daily Show starting Sept. 9, just in time for the 2024 U.S. presidential election and its second presidential debate.

The show will air at 11pm Mondays through Thursdays, and will be available on Corus’s streaming service StackTV.

For the past year, after it stopped being available on Bell Media channels, the Daily Show has only been available here on Paramount+ (plus whatever clips they post on social media).

According to Playback magazine, the show will continue to be available on Paramount+ in September, even though Corus says Slice will be “the exclusive home of the Daily Show in Canada.”

Corus, which will lose the Canadian rights to big U.S. lifestyle brands like HGTV and Food Network to Rogers in January, is scrambling to find new programming to entice Canadians to keep its channels. The Daily Show might be enough to convince people to subscribe to Slice, whose total revenues dropped 10% from 2022 to 2023, according to CRTC data.

Corus could also add The Daily Show to the Global Television schedule if it wanted to, but it really needs people to subscribe or stay subscribed to its specialty channels if it’s going to survive.

| Radio

Leclerc drops WKND in Montreal, will outsource daytime programming to QUB Radio

QUB Radio personalities, from left: Isabelle Maréchal, Benoit Dutrizac, Mario Dumont, Sophie Durocher and Richard Martineau, part of the nameless “99.5 MTL” radio station’s programming

Four years after it launched WKND 99.5, eager to introduce a new French-language commercial music station in Montreal to compete with the Bell and Cogeco behemoths, Leclerc Communication has thrown in the towel, laying off its on-air staff and choosing instead to source half its programming from Quebecor’s QUB Radio and fill the rest with low-budget rock music.

On Aug. 26, the station once known as Radio Classique will be renamed … well, there isn’t really a name for it. It’s just “99,5 Montréal”. The schedule will be identical to Quebecor’s digital opinion talk radio service between 6am and 6pm weekdays, just enough to stay under the limit of 50% talk programming so it doesn’t have to seek pre-approval from the CRTC for a format change.

QUB, meanwhile, will transition to a more radio-sounding format, with Mario Dumont becoming the morning man. There will also be regular news updates and, presumably, weather and traffic. Isabelle Maréchal, a former midday host at 98.5 FM, takes over the late morning slot, and QUB stalwarts Benoit Dutrizac, Sophie Durocher and Richard Martineau fill out the daytime schedule. Presumably evenings and weekends on QUB will still be mainly repeats and podcasts.

Evenings and weekends on 99.5 will be rock music, though Leclerc was vague on what that would sound like and how much of it would have real people behind the microphone.

The change is an admission that, despite Leclerc’s assurance that Montreal was hungry for the allegedly unique format of WKND, habits die hard and it takes a lot of time and money to pull people away from the incumbents, especially when your transmitter isn’t as powerful, you don’t have a large conglomerate to help promote it, and your industry is already suffering because of post-pandemic lifestyle changes and advertising declines.

Is this legal?

The program supply agreement between Leclerc and Quebecor is unusual, but it’s not unprecedented. Same for the half-talk half-music format. But whether it meets CRTC regulations may be up to the commission to decide. Let’s look at the issues:

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| Media

Postmedia reaches deal to acquire Saltwire Network assets

The announcement this morning that Postmedia (my employer) had reached a deal to acquire “certain” Saltwire Network assets didn’t surprise me. Not because I’m privy to confidential negotiations by senior executives at my company, but because the deal makes sense considering Postmedia’s recent dealings.

The announcement is light on details — it doesn’t specify which assets, a purchase price, whether debt will be assumed, etc. But it presumably includes Saltwire’s news outlets in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, which would expand Postmedia to nine provinces (it would be 10 but it just sold its assets in Manitoba).

The deal is not guaranteed. Closing conditions include “satisfactory outcomes with unions and other stakeholders” and court approval. But there aren’t a lot of people buying newspaper chains these days. Unless some rich person wants to own some money-losing local papers (there were “several” non-binding letters of intent, but we don’t know how serious they were), the only alternative to Postmedia might be a shutdown.

The acquisition follows other expansion moves by Postmedia, including the acquisition of Brunswick News in 2022 and an attempted but failed merger with Torstar in 2023. Postmedia also already has had some dealings with Saltwire, including for content sharing.

When Saltwire filed for creditor protection in March, the writing was on the wall. Because of its insolvent state, the sale could progress quickly. Postmedia wants key conditions satisfied by Aug. 5 so the deal can close by Aug. 26.