Monthly Archives: November 2023

| TV

The Daily Show disappears from Canada after CTV drops it (UPDATED)

If you’re like me, you missed late-night shows during the U.S. writers and actors strikes. And though you moved on to other things during the summer, you were looking forward to seeing topical comedy again when they came back.

You might have tuned to CTV at 12:05am and seen another Big Bang Theory rerun and wondered how long it would be until The Daily Show resumed production. And then you might have been confused when you learned they had been producing new episodes for weeks.

Unfortunately, you won’t be seeing The Daily Show again on CTV, or CTV Comedy, any time soon. Bell Media has dropped the show.

When I asked about it, this is the entirety of the response I received from Bell:

I can confirm that Bell Media is no longer carrying THE DAILY SHOW.

I didn’t get a reply to follow-up questions, including the obvious “why?”

A convenient hole-filler

The existence of The Daily Show on CTV, and its popularity among Canadians, probably has as much to do with a scheduling quirk as anything else.

For decades, CTV’s schedule in most markets consists of prime-time programming mainly imported from the U.S. between 8 and 11pm, followed by CTV National News until 11:30 and then late local news until 12:05am. Because the CRTC set Canadian content rules defining prime time as 6pm-12am, the schedule made sense from a regulatory perspective. The more Canadian content (including news) you put in 6-8pm and 11pm-12am, the more U.S. imports you can put in 8-11pm.

After midnight, the rules are different and U.S. imports can come back in. But the two big late-night shows, NBC’s The Tonight Show and CBS’s The Late Show, both start at 11:35pm. ABCs Jimmy Kimmel Live started at midnight but now it too has moved to 11:35.

As a half-hour show, The Daily Show could fill a gap between the 12:05am end of the local news and the 12:35am start of the late-late shows. And during the post-9/11 Jon Stewart era, it gained popularity in both countries.

Now, for whatever reason, Bell has decided it no longer makes sense. Not because schedules have changed, but probably because of money.

The Daily Show isn’t what it was under Stewart. Besides Stewart himself, top talent have moved on to other shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert or Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Since Trevor Noah’s departure a year ago, it has had a parade of fill-in hosts.

Meanwhile, The Big Bang Theory is cheap and reruns are very popular in Canada. So for now, at least, CTV is going in that direction.

The Daily Show wasn’t part of CTV’s fall schedule announcement in the summer, which means the decision not to keep it probably dates to at least then.

Where can I watch it?

So if CTV no longer has the rights to the Daily Show, where can Canadians watch it?

The short answer is you can’t. At least not yet. It’s not on a competing network, it’s not on Netflix or Amazon. Your only option to watch it legally is to buy individual episodes on Apple TV.

UPDATE: Thanks to Chris for pointing this out — Paramount+ Canada is adding The Daily Show starting Dec. 5. Comedy Central is owned by Paramount.

There wasn’t another obvious home for The Daily Show on regular Canadian TV. Global has The Late Show, Citytv has Jimmy Kimmel, and there isn’t really another non-Bell-owned comedy channel it would be a good fit for.

UPDATE (Jan. 23, 2024): Some people have noticed The Daily Show disappearing from Paramount+. I asked Paramount about it, and they said “The Daily Show does not currently have new episodes which is why none are currently appearing on Paramount+, stay tuned for more information.”

The day after, Jon Stewart announced he was returning as host one day a week, and Paramount confirmed his shows will be exclusive to Paramount+ in Canada, the day after they’re broadcast.

YouTube blackout

Fans of Seth Meyers may have noticed there aren’t as many clips of his late night show on YouTube as there used to be. Unfortunately the clips are there, they just are being blocked in Canada, along with those of the Tonight Show. Both are Bell-licensed NBC shows. It’s unclear if this is at Bell’s request, to protect its rights, or if it’s NBC’s doing, cutting off non-U.S. countries. The Daily Show has the same problem, with just a handful of YouTube clips not being restricted here.

My questions to Bell on this subject did not elicit a response.

Fortunately, Seth Meyers clips are being posted to Facebook and those are still accessible here, and Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show is posting clips (mostly vertical, cuz the youths) to social media as well.

| Radio

Rogers blames CRTC bureaucracy for decision to shut down CityNews Ottawa

This week, the CRTC published a decision officially confirming that Rogers Media Inc. has surrendered the broadcasting licence of CIWW 1310 AM in Ottawa, the city’s oldest radio station.

The letter from Rogers requesting the revocation of its licence is dated Oct. 26, the same day the company announced the shutdown of CityNews Ottawa, which at the time was being simulcast on both CIWW 1310 and CJET-FM 101.1 in nearby Smiths Falls.

While normally these letters are short and to the point, Rogers took the opportunity to lay out the reasonings for its decision, and complaining that the CRTC’s processes played a major role in it.

Saying the radio broadcasting industry is “subject to stringent and outdated regulations that offer little to no flexibility for allowing broadcasters to pivot and adjust accordingly to their new competitive reality,” Rogers explained that the issue was with its decision in 2020 to simulcast programming on both AM and FM stations without prior CRTC approval.

While the CRTC doesn’t regulate content or formats on radio stations generally, the regulations require approval before an FM station can switch to or from a specialty format, and spoken word programming, when it represents more than 50% of programming on a station, is considered a specialty format. (This rule does not apply to AM stations like CIWW.)

Before it became a CityNews station, 101.1 was a country music station (as CKBY-FM), so it would have needed approval to switch to a talk format.

What’s more, the CRTC also requires approval before a transmitter can be converted from a station to a retransmitter of another station.

“Rogers received a request for information from the Commission in February 2023 regarding the simulcast of the news/talk programming originating from CIWW on CJET-FM (101.1). In subsequent correspondence between the Commission and Rogers, Commission staff shared its view that both stations were in apparent non- compliance with the Radio Regulations, 1986 (Regulations),” Rogers writes in its letter.

Rogers says it “did not believe that its stations were in non-compliance” (it doesn’t explain why it felt this way), but it filed an application to change the licence of CJET-FM 101.1 to allow the simulcast, at least until the current licence expires in 2026.

Unfortunately for Rogers, the CRTC announced on Aug. 22 a two-year moratorium on new applications related to radio, “unless exceptional circumstances can be demonstrated that would justify, with supporting evidence when filing the request, the need to process them.”

“After several rounds of correspondence and performance evaluation analyses of both CJET-FM and CIWW,” Rogers writes, it chose to withdraw the application the next day. “The risk of non-compliance and the operational burden of the Commission’s review of the stations’ performance and financial situation coupled with the continued decline in revenues since the launch of the simulcast led us to make this decision much earlier than we were planning and were contemplating in our Application.”

“Unfortunately, the regulatory framework did not provide us with the tools to experiment and innovate without facing an untenable level of scrutiny and evaluation that we can ill afford given the competitive environment in which we are operating,” the letter continues. “For these reasons, we urge the Commission to prioritize the review of the Regulations impacting AM radio including the provisions related to simulcasting and the operation of a specialty format. These rules must be relaxed to ensure a viable path forward for AM news content on the FM band, which represents the only way to maintain audiences to local terrestrial radio and support our ability to deliver local news.”

In urging the CRTC to review its rules on AM radio, Rogers said “we remain concerned that, without a modernized and flexible approach, the future of other AM stations is at risk.”

Rogers owns eight other AM radio stations in Canada:

  • CFTR CityNews 680 in Toronto
  • CKGL CityNews 570 in Kitchener, Ont.
  • CFFR CityNews 660 in Calgary
  • CKWX CityNews 1130 in Vancouver
  • CJCL Sportsnet 590 in Toronto
  • CFAC Sportsnet 960 in Calgary
  • CISL Sportsnet 650 in Vancouver
  • CKAT 600 Country in North Bay, Ont.

I understand Rogers’ frustration with the CRTC’s rules, and in particular the commission’s baffling decision to just not do its job in terms of radio for a couple of years, but Rogers also must have been aware of the rules. And the implication that this is a simple bureaucratic matter holding up progress is not how I would describe it. Rogers took a radio station off the air for this to happen, and decided it should have the same content on two frequencies in a market that doesn’t have a lot of spare radio spectrum. Maybe that’s what’s best for the market, but it should at least have required approval.

Unfortunately, with everything going on, the result is the shutdown of another news radio station in Canada, and one more AM signal in the country going dark.

If you have a good idea for a radio station, a 50kW signal on 1310 AM in Ottawa is now available. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait two years before you can apply for it.

More call letter switching fun

Rogers also confirmed in its letter it is once again switching call letters for its FM stations in Smiths Falls. CKBY-FM, which belonged to Country 101 and was then switched to the Country 92.3 station, will go back to Country 101, while CJET-FM, which was Jack FM on 92.3 and then CityNews 101.1, is going back to 92.3. Rogers told the CRTC it would adopt a country music format separate from 101.1, but on Nov. 1 it switched to “Santa Radio Canada“, which has a very Jack-like branding to it, suggesting a move back to Jack FM might be in the cards in the new year.

| TV

TVA to replace Yoopa with TV version of QUB Radio

The fallout of the Bell-Quebecor war has another victim: Yoopa, which Bell pulled from its television service in retaliation for Quebecor’s Videotron pulling Bell channels Vrak and Z, is being shut down in January, replaced by a video version of Quebecor’s QUB Radio online radio service as of Jan. 11.

According to its annual filing with the CRTC, Yoopa had $2.6 million in revenue, all but $30,000 of which came from subscriptions, in 2021-22, and spent about $2 million on programming, a bit less than half of which was Canadian. It had 340,000 subscribers and a staff of three.

The loss leaves a hole for television targeting young children, though public broadcasters Radio-Canada and Télé-Québec devote much of their morning programming to programs for kids.

Meanwhile, Quebecor seems to be doubling down on its QUB Radio digital talk radio project, and will now be putting even more resources into it, even though it already has a 24/7 news channel in LCN. Quebecor doesn’t release ratings or financials for this online-only service so we have no idea if it’s successful. But it’s cheap, at least compared to the news programming we see on LCN.

Whether QUB Radio or its still-to-be-named TV version lasts is an open question. Honestly I’m a bit surprised it survived the latest round of media cuts at Quebecor.

In theory, QUB TV could apply to be a national news service, requiring other providers to carry it, but that would require having news bureaus and regular news updates, and the CRTC might have some questions if it tries to just piggyback on LCN’s resources to achieve that status.

Videotron will obviously embrace QUB Radio on TV. Bell is probably not interested. Whether others who carry Yoopa, like Cogeco, make the switch is an open question.

| Media

Could the end of Publisac kill community newspapers throughout Quebec?

As if things aren’t bad enough for small media outlets, TC Transcontinental announced on Friday it is rolling out its Publisac replacement throughout the province and into areas of Ontario and British Columbia that other flyer distributors have pulled out of.

This is leaving many Quebec publications worrying that what happened to Métro Média could happen to them.

Continue reading →

| Media, TV

Desperate TVA cuts a third of its staff

In what the union representing TVA employees called “La journée la plus noire de notre histoire” (the darkest day of our history), the company announced on Thursday afternoon (after a leak from La Presse forced an order to halt trading on its stock) that it is eliminating 547 jobs, representing 31% of TVA Group’s current workforce.

Most of those jobs — 300 — will be in in-house productions through its TVA Productions subsidiary. Though most drama, variety and bid-budget primetime shows are already produced by independent companies, there are a few still done in-house, and three of them — game shows Le Tricheur and La Poule aux oeufs d’or plus trending-video magazine show VLOG — are being outsourced.

This leaves news and news-adjacent programming as the only stuff still done in-house. Newscasts, LCN, morning news/talk show Salut Bonjour, and some programs at TVA Sports.

The expectation is that many of the people working on producing these shows will be hired by the independent companies they will be outsourced to, and TVA “will begin discussions with its partners to encourage them to hire employees affected by the announced measures, according to their needs.”

But that doesn’t mean they’ll get the salary or benefits they did at TVA, and it probably means no longer being unionized.

What’s changing

So here’s a quick list of what has been announced:

Continue reading →

| Media, TV

CTV adds national newscast at 5:30, taking a page from Global

A very disinterested-looking Sandie Rinaldo will host CTV National News at 5:30, but CTV wants to make sure it doesn’t take any of the spotlight off Omar Sachedina.

After decades of having local news at 6pm and national news at 11pm, CTV is mixing things up a bit, announcing this week that it is launching a new national newscast at 5:30pm weekdays on CTV stations across the country, hosted by Sandie Rinaldo.

On one hand, this could be seen as taking a direct shot at Global, which runs Global National during the supper hour, either before, after or sandwiched between local newscasts depending on the market.

On the other hand, this could be seen as CTV wanting to save some money by eliminating half an hour of local news every day and replacing it with national programming. This interpretation fits with CTV’s statement that National News “now also provides unique segments covering the key stories and events happening across Canada and around the world as part of the early evening CTV News local newscasts on Saturdays and Sundays.”

I asked Bell Media if this means cuts to local news staffing.

“We can confirm there are no impacts to staffing levels as a result of the launch of the 5:30 p.m. edition of CTV National News,” was the statement I got back.

That doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be indirect impacts, but at least there are no layoff notices going out right away.

Starting Nov. 13, CTV stations that have been running 5pm local newscasts for the past six years will see those early programs cut to half an hour and replaced by National News. Then the 6pm local newscasts will be “intensely local-focused,” according to Bell Media, since they won’t have to include as much national and international news content. It might not mean less local news (90 minutes is still plenty) but it will mean having to fill less time, and getting a break during what is right now two straight hours of broadcasting from local stations.

Global already sandwiches national news between two local newscasts in several markets including Montreal, so expect a similar feel at CTV, with the assumption that most people will watch one of the local newscasts but not both.

What early national newscasts will look like is a good question. Will it be like local noon newscasts, where reporters do live hits explaining stories they’re just starting to cover that day? Will national reporters have to file earlier, making the 11pm national newscast mainly rehashing what was reported at 5:30pm, or will the 5:30pm newscast have a lot of stories repeated from 11pm the previous day, or some mix of the two? Or will it be like just watching half an hour of CTV News Channel, but with a somewhat larger budget?

Review

UPDATE (Nov. 16): I watched CTV National News from Nov. 15, its third day on the air. It looked like the same CTV National News we’re used to. There was a bit more of that afternoon live-on-the-scene feel, particularly with some breaking stories. More live throws to reporters, although many of them were probably “look-live” in which the reporter’s part was pre-recorded.

With one exception, the 11pm newscast with Omar Sachedina had the same stories as the 5:30pm one with Sandie Rinaldo, though most of the hard-news ones were updated with the evening’s developments and reporter standups that had less daylight outside.

As for the “intensely local-focused” 6pm newscast, it looked like any other. It stayed local for 20 minutes, but for the rest of the hour I counted a couple of local stories, a couple of local briefs, a live interview and weather segments, and the rest was national news, local news from other CTV stations, and various international stories, including one that mostly duplicated one from the national news. The 5pm local newscast, in its reduced 30-minute version, stayed almost entirely local.