TORONTO – Bell Media and Bloomberg Media announced today they will join forces to build a new multi-platform business news brand called BNN Bloomberg that will debut this spring.
The two companies said Monday that the partnership will blend Bloomberg’s 2,700 business journalists and analysts in 120 countries with Canada’s lone all-business news channel.
BNN Bloomberg will use Bloomberg’s five Canadian news bureaus in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver, plus offer several hours of live evening television coverage of Asian markets, early morning programs from Europe, and contributions from Bloomberg reporters in North America and worldwide throughout the business day.
Readers will recall that Bloomberg already did this with a Canadian partner when it cast its lot with Channel Zero (owners of CHCH, Rewind, Silver Screen Classics and other media brands) to create Bloomberg TV Canada in early 2015. However, after more than two years in operation, that channel was shut down in the fall and the license returned to the CRTC when the two companies decided to end their partnership.
Despite solid programming and growing ratings, Channel Zero’s Bloomberg branded model in Canada only worked with radio as part of the equation and try as it might, the company could not get on the radio in the Toronto market. “We had a model in the partnership that had three legs to the stool – television, radio and digital,” Channel Zero CEO Cal Millar told Cartt.ca in a recent interview.
“TV worked just fine. It did everything we wanted it to, the staff were brilliant, programming was really good, we were happy with the way the ratings were coming along, we got amazing guests and the Bloomberg folks in the news business in Toronto were brilliant to work with.”
“The things that didn’t work is that we couldn’t get into the radio business in the Toronto market.” Millar says they tried to buy a station and approached every station owner in and around Toronto about switching its format to Bloomberg-branded business but found no takers. The company did have a radio deal in Vancouver, because it wanted a national radio footprint like Bloomberg has in the U.S., but it didn’t make sense to launch radio with no Toronto station in place.
“We went around the block with everybody in Toronto (radio) – we even tried to cobble together three different signals and we couldn’t make this thing work,” said Millar. “We clearly underestimated how difficult it was to get into the radio side – and without the radio, this thing was never going to make sense. So as a business, what do you do? You don’t do it for the art, it’s a business that has to be self-sustaining and it wasn’t going to be.”
There were some other mitigating factors as well, he noted, in that Bloomberg was more than a year late in getting the digital side of the Canadian media business going – and that as a small company Channel Zero found it challenging to deal with a much larger one. “I don’t cast aspersions on Bloomberg for that, we just underestimated how much of a pain that was going to be,” he said. “They are first and foremost a terminal and data company. First, second, third, fourth and fifth and then up to 89th I think – and then after that, they’re a media company.”
“Without radio in Toronto, we couldn’t see how it would ever work.” – Cal Millar, Channel Zero
Finally, Bloomberg TV Canada was carried by every BDU in Canada, said Millar, except Bell TV – whose media arm owns the competition with which it is now teaming up. “Bell judged for their reasons that it was better to protect their own business than to offer Canadians a wider viewpoint, a diversity of viewpoints but that’s a commercial transaction and it was a contributing factor, but it wasn’t going to be the be-all and end-all,” he explained.
“It would have helped, but radio was really the linchpin. Without radio in Toronto, we couldn’t see how it would ever work.”
So, last fall the company quietly worked with Canadian BDUs to transition from Bloomberg TV Canada back to the straight U.S. feed, cancelling all of its Canadian programming in the fall and laying off its staff. Channel Zero did, however, take Bloomberg from under a million subscribers in Canada to close to seven million, added Millar, who remains disappointed they couldn’t make it work.
“I still believe Canada needs another voice in the business space,” he added.
So now, Bloomberg is tied up with its competitor. The move to BNN Bloomberg will, not surprisingly, see its syndicated radio content made available for distribution to Bell Media Radio stations across Canada, including rights to distribute the Bloomberg Radio livestream in Canada and a new channel on iHeartRadio. BNN’s website will also transform into BNN Bloomberg.ca in the coming months.
In the U.S., Bloomberg owns stations serving New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and its syndicated content is widely distributed on dozens of other radio stations.
“Adding Bloomberg’s worldwide assets, culture, and multi-platform product offering to Canada’s established and most-watched business news network is an ideal fit,” said Bell Media president Randy Lennox, in the news release. “BNN Bloomberg will evolve Canadian business news for years to come, while also offering considerable and valuable content to our radio stations across the country.”
“As a leading global business media company, Bloomberg Media provides a unique and differentiated multi-platform content offering, and this agreement reinforces our aggressive partnership expansion strategy with leading news providers in the world’s most important markets,” added Bloomberg Media CEO Justin B. Smith.
