TORONTO – At his company’s Wednesday morning executive briefing to kick off its upfront presentations, Shaw Media president Paul Robertson told TV writers that the company’s near total lack of sports content doesn’t concern him a bit.
When compared to Rogers Media (owners of the Sportsnet brands, The Toronto Blue Jays, NFL games on Citytv and some others) and Bell Media (TSN brands, RDS, NFL games on CTV and soon, co-ownership of Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment with Rogers), Shaw has almost no sports – save some professional golf on Global on the weekends.
No biggie, though, said Robertson. “You can’t be great at everything,” he explained, pointing to how the company’s stable of 19 specialty channels form a strong port folio, several of which complement each other, as well as the main network.
That said, “we continue to look at opportunities on an ongoing basis in terms of where we might introduce more sports on Global,” he added. “We did make a pretty significant turn in strategy where we were working away on thinking about launching a specialty sports network and then said ‘no, that’s not something that we’d like to do’.”
“Do we think that puts us at a competitive disadvantage? No. We think our advantage is primarily what we bring to the party by the combination of Global plus these extraordinary specialty channels.”
Okay, but after the 2012 Olympics, the Canadian broadcast rights for 2014 Sochi and 2016 Rio de Janiero are still up for grabs (the International Olympic Committee has apparently rejected two separate bids from a CTV/CBC consortium, saying they were too low). Would Shaw Media be interested in acquiring those rights?
“I would consider it, yes I would,” said Robertson (shown on stage with Shaw Media SVP content Barb Williams on his right and ET Canada host Cheryl Hickey on his left).
– Greg O’Brien
