
TORONTO – Corus Entertainment and Bell Media have officially agreed to terminate their share purchase agreement for French-language specialty channels Historia and Séries+ since, as announced Monday, the Commissioner of Competition did not approve the $200 million sale of the channels to Bell.
It was in 2014 that Bell was made to divest the channels as a condition of its purchase of Astral Media to reduce its concentration of specialty channel ownership.
The Competition Bureau’s decision this time around will likely have pleased Quebecor Media CEO Pierre-Karl Péladeau, who argued here in April against the deal.
Should Corus still be interested in selling the channels, Quebecor is one possibility, however a case could be made that two more French language specialties under Péladeau’s roof could be too many. Another possibility, of course, is Montreal’s Stingray, which has been in acquisition mode since it went public in 2015.
However, in the short Wednesday release announcing the termination of the deal, Corus said it “will continue to own and operate Historia and Séries+ and also remains an active contributor to the Quebec broadcast and production community with Global Montreal, Télétoon and La chaîne Disney, as well as Toon Boom, its animation software company.”
UPDATE: On Thursday, May 31st, the Competition Bureau released a backgrounder with more of an explanation as to why it denied the sale of the two channels back to Bell, upholding its original decision to force Bell to divest the two channels. It considered many reasons why that could be reversed, including the changes to the competitive video marketplace in Canada but ultimately, "the Bureau considered the growth in subscriptions to over-the-top services, such as Netflix, and determined that this change had no material impact on the competitive dynamic between programming service providers and programming distributors," reads the Bureau's reasoning.
Click here for the full background.