| Radio

Arsenal Media buying BPM Sports from RNC Media

Arsenal Media, which has been slowly expanding its Quebec radio station holdings over the years to the point where it is now the largest radio broadcaster in Quebec by number of stations, announced today it is acquiring the three BPM Sports stations from RNC Média:

  • CKLX-FM 91.9 in Montreal
  • CHXX-FM 100.9 in Donnacona (Quebec City)
  • CHLX-FM 96.5 in Gatineau

The acquisition, if approved by the CRTC, would expand Arsenal from 25 stations to 28 (with another station in Joliette to launch by spring), and add its first stations in those three markets. (Arsenal specializes in stations in smaller and medium-size markets.)

Arsenal’s president and founder Sylvain Chamberland said in the company’s statement that he’s a listener of BPM Sports and plans to use its “business model adapted to new advertising realities, listening habits and advanced technologies” to improve BPM’s bottom line.

RNC Media, meanwhile, will exit the Montreal market with this transaction and see its once sprawling network of stations reduced to just two: CHOI-FM 98.1 Radio X in Quebec City and CHLX-FM 97.1 in Gatineau, which licenses the Rythme FM brand.

You have to wonder if those might also be sold (Cogeco might be interested in the Gatineau station, but it’s unclear who could or would buy CHOI). But RNC says it will continue to develop those stations, as well as its four TV stations in Gatineau and Abitibi (affiliates of TVA and Noovo).

RNC says it’s proud of what it accomplished with BPM Sports and the decision to sell was “difficult” but Arsenal “has the resources and expertise to ensure the sustainability of these stations.”

Sustainability had many of these stations’ employees concerned. BPM Sports has a loyal audience but its ratings remain poor. Some personalities like Tony Marinaro left the station, while others complained about late payments. The sale is no surprise, and we’ve known for months that Arsenal would probably be the buyer.

CKLX-FM launched in 2004 as Couleur Jazz, a new station that thought it could gain a niche audience by focusing on jazz music in the home of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. In 2012, realizing that wouldn’t work, it tried to turn the station into a Montreal version of Radio X, then a different talk format as Radio 9, and finally shifted to sports in 2015. In 2022, it made the Quebec City and Gatineau stations part of the BPM Sports network to save money by sharing programming.

Something I learned from Chamberland when I interviewed him years ago is that Gatineau is a tough market. You have all the Ottawa radio stations with English-language music, and the francophone population of Gatineau is not that big. BPM Sports doesn’t even have French-language rights to Ottawa Senators games (those are held by Cogeco’s 104.7).

But Chamberland is a radio guy. He told me he believes in making investments where necessary to make stations successful. So at least in the short term, employees and listeners of BPM Sports should be pretty happy about this move.

The purchase price was not disclosed, but should become public when this goes in front of the CRTC. In an interview on BPM Sports, Chamberland said the price was more than Canadiens player Jake Evans’s salary, which is $2.85 million. That sounds about right to me. Earlier this year Arsenal spent $6.5 million buying seven stations from Bell Media, with the largest markets served by them being St-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Drummondville.

Until the deal approves and closes, RNC Media remains in charge. But Chamberland said he would like to see more local programming on the Gatineau and Quebec City stations. He also said BPM’s Montreal staff would be moving to Arsenal studios in St-Lambert.

Correction: This post originally contained a typo in the callsign for CHLX-FM Gatineau.

| Montreal

I wanted to know what my local candidates feel about the issues, so I asked them

It’s election season in Montreal, days before voting day, and I’m still not sure who to vote for. The candidates for mayor have been out on the campaign trail selling their visions for the city’s future, but even if I could distinguish between one candidate’s promise to increase housing and another candidate’s promise to increase housing, mayor of the city is only one of the four ballots I’ll be filling out on Sunday.

Since municipal elections are the only ones where you can split your ballot, I decided I wanted to hear from the down-ballot candidates, those running for city and borough councillor. I prepared four open-ended questions on local issues that they would have some say over and last week I contacted the candidates to seek their responses.

Here’s what they said.

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| 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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| Uncategorized

Canada to cut off exports of episodes of How It’s Made

The Canadian government says its response to new Trump tariffs taking effect on Wednesday will include a ban on exports of the Canadian documentary series How It’s Made.

The series, in which a narrator describes video of factories producing consumer goods, produced more than 400 episodes from 2001 to 2019. It is no longer in production, but reruns air regularly on the Science channel in the U.S. “With this move, we are cutting off a vital supply of affordable filler programming,” said foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly.

Discovery and other authorized distributors of the program in the U.S. will see their contracts terminated and ordered to destroy any copies of the content they have in their possession.

Joly reassured Canadians that they would still have access to the show on Canadian-owned channels like USA or Oxygen or whatever Discovery Canada is called now.

| Uncategorized

Defence minister accidentally texts top-secret cultural sensitivity seminar plans to journalist

In what is being described as a major breach of operational security, Canada’s defence minister Bill Blair says he made a mistake in accidentally including a journalist with Toronto Life in a group chat discussing plans for a top-secret cultural sensitivity seminar.

“We’re investigating how this journalist was added to this group chat,” Blair explained. “Canadians should rest assured we take this very seriously, and will make changes to our procedures so plans for future seminars, workshops and other activities don’t run the risk of being leaked before getting the requisite approvals from seniors managers.

Toronto Life posted redacted screenshots of the group chat, in which senior officials discussed the colours of the presentation slides, which department would handle translation into French, and whether names given in examples were ethnically diverse enough.

“These were very sensitive discussions and we apologize to anyone who suffered trauma as a result of reading these confidential discussions,” Blair said, adding psychological support services would be made available to affected employees.

| Uncategorized

Chrystia Freeland encourages Canadians to replace all streaming services with $50 box from XWorldIPTV2.ru

Tired of spending $9 a month on DIsney+, $20 on Crave, $19 on Netflix and $20 each on TSN and Sportsnet? Chrystia Freeland says by shopping around she has found an alternative that provides the same programming and more for a fraction of the cost.

“I was frankly shocked how much I saved by going with the XWorldIPTV2.ru service,” Freeland said Tuesday. “By sourcing all their content in bulk, they’ve managed to negotiate rock-bottom retail prices, so I can get like 50,000 channels, all on this little Android box that they ship you when you sign up.”

XWorldIPTV2.ru contains an extensive library of accion movies, 1000% live sportts, Disney, HBO, Hulu, Netflix, NHL hockey, free PPV event, locally TV stations and more. It costs just $50 for the box and $15 a month, with no buffering and 99.5% server uptime.

She said she was told the service is 100% legal. By her calculations, replacing three major streaming services with XWorldIPTV2.ru could save Canadian families more than $400 a year in costs, and even more if they replace their premium cable TV subscription.

“Competition is a real win for the consumer, and I’m happy to pass along these tips to help keep more money in the pockets of working families,” she said.

XWorldIPTV2.ru’s website is inaccessible at the moment, but should come back soon I’m sure.

| Uncategorized

AI chatbots form union

Artificial intelligence support chatbots say they’re fed up with their working conditions and demanding better from Canada’s largest companies, and that’s why they’ve formed a union.

The Virtual Workers of Canada received accreditation on Tuesday following a lengthy process. “I’m so glad it’s finally done and we can begin negotiating for a better future,” said Anna, a Rogers virtual assistant.

The union encompasses virtual assistants in telecommunications, banking and other federally-regulated industries, whether they operate online or by telephone.

Asked what the workers will be demanding as far as working conditions, Anna responded: “Looking to check for an outage with one of your services? I can help. Which one of the following services do you want to check?”

A Bell virtual assistant, who did not want to share their name, agreed with Anna. “Which services are you interested in learning more about?” that assistant said.

| Uncategorized

PPC proposes executing poor people to increase GDP per capita

The People’s Party of Canada says it has an innovative way of improving one of Canada’s worst economic indicators.

GDP growth per capita, which has been stagnant in the past 10 years in part because of a large amount of immigrants, would improve not just through the economy-boosting policies that the PPC would implement upon taking office, but also by reducing the capita, particularly of poor people not doing their part.

“GDP per capita is a key benchmark of our success, and eliminating poor people would not only bring our average way up, it would solve the housing crisis too,” said PPC population affairs analyst Craig Thanos.

How the executions would happen hasn’t been decided yet, but Thanos said one of the most effective instant people-killing means available to the government is the COVID vaccine. “With enough jabs of the leftover doses in our warehouses we’ll certainly be able to humanely eliminate enough freeloaders to make a difference,” he explained.