Category Archives: TV

| TV

Montreal morning news show among Global TV cuts

As it awaits approval for a plan to hand over the company to its debt holders, Corus Entertainment made another round of cuts this week in TV and radio, and announced changes to how local Global News newscasts would be produced in local markets.

Unifor says 43 positions were cut among its members, more than half in Alberta, where Corus says it will move production of local news to its facilities in Toronto.

The union representing employees at Global Montreal, which is part of the SCFP (CUPE) union federation, tells me two of its employees will be affected by the de facto cancellation of Global Montreal’s morning newscast.

The union said it couldn’t specify what kind of positions were being cut. As this is a union shop, the actual identities of who will get cut could change.

“We are disappointed by Corus’ decision to eliminate additional positions at Global News, including two in Montreal, and to end Montreal’s only English morning television show. These cuts affect dedicated media professionals who have devoted themselves to serving the public and delivering trusted local journalism,” the statement read.

“This is not only a difficult day for our members and their families, but also for viewers who rely on local news. The loss of another local program further reduces the diversity of voices and coverage available in Montreal’s English-speaking community.

“We, at Local 4502, stand in solidarity with every member affected by these layoffs and will continue to advocate for the value of local journalism and the people who make it possible.”

Global Montreal’s morning news was already a Frankensteinish blending of local and national segments produced on a shoestring budget. Now those local segments will disappear too.

“We continue to face audience and revenue challenges related to Global News morning shows, particularly in our smaller markets. As a result, we have decided to introduce one centralized morning show to broadcast across all Eastern stations, with implementation targeted for end of July,” reads an internal Corus memo. ‘While this is a significant change, it allows us to strengthen and sustain local journalism by focusing investments where they can have the greatest impact. Local storytelling will remain a core part of this new regional morning program.”

Our west, where Global News is more popular among audiences, it still had local control rooms in Calgary and Edmonton producing their local newscasts (as well as Lethbridge). Now that ends and those will be produced out of Toronto.

And on the radio side, while they’re not shutting down stations like Rogers did last week, they will be using more voice tracking and syndication.

The changes are part of a long train of centralization moves going back 20 years. Each time Global talks about investing more in local news by shifting resources from technical positions to editorial ones. But the result always seems to feel less local. First, production of the evening news was centralized. Then they had the local news anchored out of Toronto. (A change they partially backtracked on.)

Things looked optimistic in 2013 when a local Montreal morning show launched, a first in many years (CityTV Montreal would launch a short-lived local Breakfast Television later that year.) The new show was part of tangible benefits promised to the CRTC when Shaw bought the Global network from Canwest. And to Global’s credit, it kept the show going after its CRTC commitment expired.

But with the company in financial crisis and about to be handed over to finance people, the cuts are becoming more desperate.

| TV

CBC, Citytv will no longer air NHL games

The news came in a brief, simple joint statement from Rogers Sports and Media and CBC, issued a day and a half after the end of the Stanley Cup Playoffs: “the public broadcaster will no longer carry NHL broadcasts after the current season…”

Sunday’s game, in which the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup against the Vegas Golden Knights, was the last NHL game to air on CBC Television.

Here’s what we know so far about how this shakes out:

Citytv is out too

I asked Rogers to clarify what this means for Rogers-owned Citytv, which also airs Saturday night games as part of Hockey Night in Canada. A Sportsnet PR spokesperson said NHL Saturday night and playoff games will be exclusive to Sportsnet, so no more games on Citytv either. A Citytv spokesperson said Citytv will air “entertainment programming” instead on Saturday nights, so expect reruns of Hudson and Rex and other shows unless they come up with something else.

What CBC will do with Saturday nights

CBC, meanwhile, plans to start a new Saturday night primetime show with Olympic-style sports, the kinds of sports they currently air on weekend afternoons.

CBC owns the Hockey Night in Canada brand and trademarks, and says it will continue using them for non-NHL hockey content. Right now the only organized hockey content on CBC is some weekend afternoon regular-season PWHL games.

(Sportsnet’s Hockey Night in Canada theme song, which it commissioned when HNIC lost the rights to the original hockey theme, remains Sportsnet’s property.)

How Sportsnet will schedule Saturday nights

One of the reasons Sportsnet kept CBC as part of its NHL broadcast network in 2014 is that it needed more channels to show simultaneous national games on Saturday nights. At the time, Sportsnet’s main network, the four regional channels, carried the same programming for national games, because many households didn’t have access to all four of the regional channels.

Twelve years later, most people are on a digital cable system or streaming and do have access to those channels. Add in Sportsnet One and Sportsnet 360 and it gives six channels, which for most Saturdays should be enough, even if there’s also a Blue Jays game, UFC Fight Night, curling or some other event they need to broadcast. And in a pinch, they can also bring Citytv back into the fold, use a non-sports channel like FX or have something exclusive to streaming.

OMNI and APTN third-language broadcasts

It’s unclear how this will affect Sportsnet’s partnerships with Rogers-owned OMNI or independent APTN, which broadcast some Saturday NHL games in Punjabi and Cree/Inuktitut, respectively.

Asked about these agreements, Sportsnet PR said there were no updates on this and we’d know more closer to the start of the season.

OMNI still has some over-the-air transmitters in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, and APTN has transmitters in Yellowknife and Whitehorse, so there might still be some NHL on over-the-air TV.

Both adopt the “Hockey Night” branding so would probably have to change their names if they continue.

A history recap

CBC and Citytv have been part of the Rogers HNIC plan since Rogers first acquired national NHL rights starting with the 2014-15 season. The deal with CBC was first established at four years, then extended to the full 12 of the original NHL contract.

Under the deal, CBC essentially gave over control of its signal to Rogers, who retained all advertising revenue from the (mostly Leafs) games in exchange for some on-air promotion of other CBC shows. The broadcasts also counted as free Canadian content for CBC, which was not a trivial consideration back when the broadcaster was a bit more budget-sensitive.

This fall, Rogers moves to a new NHL deal that will see it pay more than double to the league on average. And it looks like it has decided it needs to give people more of a push to subscribe to Sportsnet, even if that means losing some Saturday night fairweather fans.

The reason for this decision (and whether it was Rogers or CBC who made the call) wasn’t announced, but the fact that Rogers is also pulling Citytv out of the mix gives a pretty big hint. CBC says it tried to negotiate a new deal but the two sides couldn’t come to an agreement.

The writing was a bit on the wall two years ago when CBC lost the rights to stream NHL games that aired on CBC TV on its Gem streaming service.

The risks of going subscription-only

Whether to broadcast on over-the-air television is always a tough decision for sports leagues and their partner broadcasters. Some games for free can give people a taste of the action that would then spur them to subscribe. But too much for free and people might decide they can live without the rest.

Some leagues, like the NFL, have prioritized over-the-air while still offering some games to streamers and pay TV. Others, like MLS, have gambled on giving exclusive rights to pay services, only to face anger from teams in the league that nobody watches their games anymore.

I suspect this decision will put the NHL somewhere in the middle. The NHL is more popular in Canada than MLS, and Sportsnet is a popular service among people who follow sports. But the decision to pull playoff games from free TV means we probably won’t see record-setting audiences the next time a Canadian team goes deep. (They’ll still be high though, Sportsnet and TSN alone can still draw in millions for the right event.)

I suspect we’ll also still see Rogers running games on Citytv when they also air on ABC, to recoup that simultaneous substitution money. And if Rogers keeps running Hockey Night in Canada in Punjabi on OMNI, people who have that station over the air or on basic cable will still be able to watch the games, even if they don’t understand the language.

One winner of this decision might be TVA Sports, if it renews its deal with the NHL. There were a non-trivial number of francophone Canadiens fans who watched Saturday nights on Citytv because they either didn’t like the TVA broadcast or didn’t subscribe to TVA Sports. If TVA retains the French-language national rights (and we still don’t know if they will), then we might see a slight uptick in people who subscribe for those games.

Money talks

At the end of the day, what matters is money. Yes, Sportsnet may lose some audience and the ad revenue that comes with it, but over the past decade the focus has shifted from ad revenue to subscription revenue. And Rogers has decided that it needs to use those Saturday and playoff games to push people to subscribe to Sportsnet, because that’s where they make their money.

| TV

TSN loses Saturday night CFL games in new 6-year deal

If you hear Bell Media talk about it, it’s a “landmark” deal that “solidifies” its “position as Canada’s Home of the CFL.”

The reality is that while it’s a big deal for the CFL, it’s a big change for CFL fans, who will now have to subscribe to a new service to get their games, after many years of TSN having 100% exclusive rights to CFL games within Canada.

The six-year deal, which starts in 2027, is as follows:

  • TSN keeps about 3/4 of regular-season games (60 games total), including Thursday and Friday night games. It also keeps seven of nine playoff games (in an expanded playoff format that also begins that year), including the Grey Cup.
  • DAZN gets an exclusive window for Saturday 7pm ET games (21 games total), and one preseason game. It also gets two playoff games in the first two rounds. DAZN also becomes the exclusive broadcaster for all CFL games outside Canada and the United States.
  • YouTube gets some preseason games not carried by TSN or DAZN, as well as some non-game content including “enhanced” CFL Combine coverage.
  • RDS remains the exclusive French-language broadcaster with all Alouettes games and all playoff games. (It presumably can show non-Alouettes games on Saturday nights as well, though it’s not clear if there are any limitations on this.)

The CFL doesn’t mention U.S. rights in this announcement. Those rights are held by CBS Sports, but are apparently in their final year, so we’ll probably get another announcement about that later. It also doesn’t include radio broadcast rights, which are unaffected.

DAZN costs $35 a month for its basic plan, $25 a month if you subscribe for a year or $250 a year if you pay upfront. That’s a high price to pay if you just want to watch the once a month on average your team will play on a Saturday night.

The deal makes sense for DAZN, which also has NFL games, but I remember the hype when that deal was first announced in 2017, how DAZN was going to be the “home of football” in Canada. The reality is that while it remains the only place you can stream every game, Bell Media still has rights to Thursday, Sunday and Monday night NFL games and at least half a dozen Sunday afternoon games.

I also remember when DAZN got the English Premier League exclusively, and how much of a pain that was not just for viewers but for bars and pubs wanting to show them as well.

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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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| 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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| 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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