By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC has found that OneSoccer is owned, operated and controlled by Canadians, turning away a claim by Rogers that the cable giant was effectively negotiating a carry agreement with Spain’s Mediapro.
Rogers filed the complaint with the CRTC last summer, disputing an earlier finding by commission staff that said the OneSoccer service was operated by Canadians. Before that, in March 2023, the commission found that Rogers was giving itself an undue preference by refusing to carry the service in competition with its Sportsnet and Bell’s equivalent channels. Rogers had argued that OneSoccer — which Rogers alleged was grossly inflating its value in negotiations — had limited appeal with viewers.
Crucially, the cable giant argued that the CRTC cannot adjudicate carry disputes if one side isn’t Canadian, so it stopped negotiating with the service’s owners until the commission ruled publicly on the ownership issue.
The CRTC on Monday found that Timeless was, in fact, the one pulling the strings at the time of the filing of the undue preference complaint and all the way through to its March decision, confirming a previous finding of its own staff and reaffirming its right to adjudicate on the undue preference application.
Key executives of Timeless, which oversees the day-to-day operations of the service, each hold 50 per cent of the shares of the parent company, JRB Holdings Corp., and that 80 per cent of the board members of Timeless are Canadian, the commission found.
“The Commission considers that Timeless has retained the ongoing ability to determine the strategic decision-making activities of OneSoccer,” the commission wrote.
Rogers said it made the discovery about what it perceived as an ownership discrepency with the release of a Mediapro press release on December 20, 2022, in which the company states that it operates OneSoccer and that Mediapro is the Canadian subsidiary of Spain’s GRUP Mediapro.
It said further evidence of Mediapro’s control was seen when the Canadian subsidiary of the Barcelona-based company settled a legal battle in Ontario Superior Court with Canadian Soccer Business (CSB) in June 2024, citing a Canadian Press article. That settlement saw Mediapro transfer all “OneSoccer online service, intellectual property, and all associated rights” to Timeless, which is owned by the chairman of the Canadian Premier League and the CSB.
Rogers said it wasn’t clear if the CRTC took that development into consideration when its staff ruled that OneSoccer was owned by Canadians in a letter dated June 28, 2024.
After Rogers asked the CRTC to investigate OneSoccer’s ownership on April 11 — the deadline ordered by the CRTC to comment on how to resolve the impasse — it said Timeless produced two new agreements with Mediapro, which Rogers alleged “appears to have occurred following Rogers’s April 11 letter,” which asked the commission to settle the ownership matter.
These agreements, Rogers alleged, “strongly suggested that OneSoccer only came into compliance with the Direction after” the CRTC’s undue preference decision.
But the CRTC disagrees. “The Commission is of the view that Mediapro provided its services under the direction of Timeless, and that production and technical services, such as those covered in the Term Sheet and Services Agreement, on their own do not grant control to the party providing them,” the CRTC said Monday.
“Finally, the fact that OneSoccer remains on the air despite Mediapro no longer producing content for the service, and that Timeless entered into a new production agreement with the Canadian company MidPro, is evidence that Timeless exercises control over the service,” it added. MidPro began producing programming for the service at the beginning of this year.
The CRTC is again asking the parties to provide it with updated proposed remedies for resolving the undue preference and disadvantage issues by August 11.
