Monthly Archives: August 2025

| 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.

Continue reading →

| 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.

Continue reading →