GATINEAU – The CRTC has decided November 5th is the day it will hear why Corus Entertainment should be able to purchase French specialty channels Historia and Series+, three Ottawa radio stations and the piece of Teletoon (including its other animation brands) it does not yet own.
In March, Corus agreed to purchase the assets in question as part of the divestitures required as conditions of the Bell Media purchase of Astral Media. While it already held 50% of Teletoon/Télétoon (as well as Teletoon Retro in English and French, and the Cartoon Network) with Astral, it owned none of the two French specialities, both of which had been split 50-50 between Astral and Corus’ corporate cousin Shaw Media.
According to the CRTC filings, the value ascribed to the Teletoon brands is $249 million while Historia’s purchase price is $98 million and Series+ price is $179 million. The two Ottawa radio stations included in the deal (CKQB-FM The Bear 106.9 and CJOT-FM Boom 99.7 are valued at $13 million. That means Corus will be paying $539 million for the assets.
In announcing the hearing, the CRTC made special mention to caution Corus about how “barring other policy considerations, transactions resulting in one person controlling less than 35% of the total television audience share in one language would be processed expeditiously, whereas it would carefully examine transactions where one person controlled between 35% and 45% of the total television audience share in one language.”
Since JR Shaw is the controlling shareholder of both Corus Entertainment and Shaw Communications, the parent of Shaw Media – and together the two companies approach that audience threshold – the Commission will examine whether or not this transaction violates its vertical integration or diversity of voices policies, in spite of the fact the two companies are separate publicly traded entities.
However, having to hop through regulatory hoops is nothing new for Corus and Shaw. When it comes to the linkage rules on specialty channel carriage, for example, Corus channels are considered affiliated services and do not count as independents for Shaw Cable and Shaw Direct in the same way they would for Rogers Cable. As Shaw Communications president Peter Bissonnette told us in the fall of 2012: “We’re already treated as though we own (Corus) from a regulatory point of view.”
– Greg O’Brien
