TORONTO – Competition in business television is about to get fierce.
On Thursday, Channel Zero and Bloomberg Media will officially announce a new, long-term, exclusive partnership which will see the independent Canadian broadcaster launch a new, Canadian version of the popular business news cable channel early in the second half of 2015. (Bloomberg TV, the financial news channel owned by billionaire entrepreneur and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is currently on the CRTC’s eligible satellite list and is carried by most large and many small distributors in Canada, the notable exceptions being Bell Canada and Vidéotron.)
“It’s a really good opportunity to enhance the U.S. channel with comprehensive Canadian coverage,” said Todd Swidler, global head of content partnerships for Bloomberg Media, in explaining the move. “Today, Canadians need to choose between a U.S.-focused channel or a Canadian-focused channel, and this is an opportunity to launch Bloomberg Television Canada to bring together both elements into a single channel.”
Once Bloomberg TV Canada is launched, the U.S. feed will be pulled from Canadian distributors and replaced by the Canadian one. “We are launching under the 2012 exemption order,” Channel Zero president and COO Cal Millar (pictured above, right, with Michael Bloomberg) told Cartt.ca in an interview. That order clears the way for anyone to launch a Category B specialty channel – so long as it stays below 200,000 subscribers – a mark Millar believes the channel will probably exceed pretty quickly. At that point it will apply for a Category B license.
While most of the programming will look like Bloomberg News does now, Bloomberg TV Canada will air hourly hits of Canadian business news on the channel from its new studio now under construction in Bloomberg’s Brookfield Place offices, right in the heart of Toronto’s financial district. In the evenings is when the channel will show off its original Canadian content with a pair of hour-long shows which have yet to be named – or staffed. The company is currently looking for on-air talent, producers, up to 50 people to produce Canadian content for multiple platforms which will be used in Canada and on Bloomberg’s TV, web and mobile feeds around the world.
One of the attractions to working with Bloomberg, notes Millar and his news director Mike Katrycz, is the company already has 30 journalists working in Canada, not just at its Canadian HQ in Toronto, but at its bureaus in Ottawa, Calgary, Montreal, Vancouver and Winnipeg. All told, Bloomberg employs 2,400 journalists working in 150 bureaus around the world.
Of course, while a lot of that provides syndicated news to newspapers and other media outlets (including soon-to-be-competitor BNN, for example), that newsgathering primarily feeds the vaunted Bloomberg Terminal business. The terminal is what drives the company. They provide real-time data, news and messaging to thousands of clients around the world who rely on up-to-the second data in order to make financial decisions. The terminal is indispensable to financial analysts, hedge and mutual fund managers and so forth. Many newsrooms have one and use it to track global business stories.
"We look forward to providing our clients and business executives with engaging and informative television, detailing the impacts of global news on Canadian business and highlighting the newsmakers in Canada who are moving global markets." – Michael Bloomberg
“With this TV channel, we’re bringing the world to Canada – and we’re also bringing Canada to the world,” added David Scanlan, managing editor for Bloomberg Canada. “So, if (Prime Minister) Stephen Harper wants to go on television to talk about his latest initiative, he comes in here to talk to a Canadian audience – and he also speaks to a global audience.”
As another example, Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz made some recent waves talking about the loonie from Istanbul, Turkey during the G20 Summit. “Well guess what? Bloomberg reporters are in Istanbul, covering the G20. So, we had this interview with Poloz talking about the dollar,” said Scanlan. “Now, if we had the Canadian channel, we could have put that on there and broadcast that to Canada and to the world. We have that global reach that nobody else can match. The infrastructure’s already there on the print side and now we’re expanding that to the television side. That’s what makes this so powerful.”
Another one of those platforms is intended to be radio, as well. Channel Zero twice tried to get a radio station license from the CRTC (in 2012 in Toronto and 2014 in Vancouver) to launch an all-talk business news station, but it was denied both times. It has not given up, however. “Bloomberg has radio stations currently in New York, Boston and San Francisco. So, we are going to take some of the feeds directly from them, but the difference here is instead of an ‘end of day’ show we will obviously use drive times where we will put a Canadian show on the radio,” said Millar.
However, Channel Zero still doesn’t own any radio stations in Canada, so Millar says the company is looking to partner with radio owners in Canada – and is even looking to buy – aiming at AM stations in or very near to Canada’s largest markets. It is close to making at least one radio acquisition, said Millar.
During the two years it has taken to bring the channel to fruition, Bloomberg and Channel Zero executives found themselves to be cut from similar entrepreneurial cloth. It may surprise some that Bloomberg chose one of the smaller Canadian media companies with which to partner. “Channel Zero has the experience also in television news reporting and understands the news business and has similar DNA to Bloomberg being an innovative, being entrepreneurial, being independent,” added Swidler.
There is also the seven million households CHCH reaches per week as an attractive cross-promotional vehicle. Plus, CHCH, Channel Zero’s conventional TV station, will be able to enhance its own news coverage with Bloomberg business news.
“Canada is a vital market for us. The Bloomberg Professional service has been in Canada’s top financial firms for more than 25 years, and it is now one of our fastest growing markets in the world.” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority shareholder of Bloomberg L.P. “We look forward to providing our clients and business executives with engaging and informative television, detailing the impacts of global news on Canadian business and highlighting the newsmakers in Canada who are moving global markets."
These types of partnerships (it’s not just a brand licensing deal as many other Canadianized versions of U.S. TV brands are) are ventures Bloomberg has deployed around the world. “We have about a dozen of these types of localized branded partnerships around the world. We’ve just launched one in Mexico. They’re in Turkey, in India, in Malaysia… We have one in Brazil on the digital size. So, this is a moment where we’ve deployed in other markets as well,” said Swidler.
While the focus is to get the new channel up and running and serving its viewers, Katrycz also plans to use Bloomberg to enhance CHCH’s news by contributing “whatever they can into our all day news programming. It’s a great enhancement,” he said.
“We want to be carried at least where BNN is carried… because it’s a better product and it’s an alternative to the BNN monopoly. We’ve had conversations with all of the BDUs now and we’re encouraged.” – Cal Millar, Channel Zero
“I can envision cutting over as we do to our Toronto bureau now, on CHCH, we can also cut over to the Bloomberg office,” added Millar.
Key to the channel’s success, however, as with any specialty service, will be carriage. Bell Media’s Business News Network is well-entrenched and is the only Canadian-owned national 24-hour business news TV channel. It has had the space to itself for 15 years since its launch as ROBTv. The only other channel in the financial news space available in Canada is CNBC. Fox Business Network is on the eligible satellite list, but is not carried by any Canadian distributors.
“We want to be carried at least where BNN is carried,” said Millar, “because it’s a better product and it’s an alternative to the BNN monopoly. We’ve had conversations with all of the BDUs now and we’re encouraged.” said Millar.
To use Eastlink as an example, BNN is on basic cable, while Bloomberg is pick and pay, or part of the “World News” package with Al-Jazeera CNN International and Euronews. With Rogers and Shaw, however, both channels are in the same news tier or on pick and pay. With Bell TV and Fibe, BNN is on basic and Bloomberg is not carried at all.
Once carriage is in place (and just as a benchmark, BNN counts about 6.3 million subscribers), Bloomberg TV Canada intends to go hard after advertisers with a pitch that the channel isn’t just for Bay Streeters. (In 2013, the last year of data available from the CRTC, BNN earned $32 million in revenue, $8 million from advertising. The channel turned a before-tax profit of $14 million.)
“This channel gives advertisers an opportunity to speak directly to a Canadian audience – and Bloomberg’s influential business viewer." Todd Swidler, Bloomberg Media
“This channel gives advertisers an opportunity to speak directly to a Canadian audience – and Bloomberg’s influential business viewer… and that is something that we think is also differential for the channel,” added Swidler. “Today, a Canadian advertiser that wants to be on Bloomberg Television would have to buy all of North America and this provides the ability for an advertiser, whether they’re Canadian or international, to speak directly to that Canadian audience and speak directly to Bloomberg’s influential business audience.”
“We very much want to earn our living off of our advertising and to do that we need distribution,” said Millar. “This is an opportunity from our standpoint and (the carriers’) for a very low cost service, in comparison, perhaps, to a competitor on the video side, where all we need is broad distribution and we can earn our living and provide a better service to our mutual viewers, our mutual customers… There’s got to be some distribution cost to it on subscription basis, but with those negotiations we’ve indicated pretty clearly we’ve got some flexibility.”
Plus, business news isn’t just for businesspeople. It affects everything and everyone. Farmers keep close tabs on the markets – and their fate affects our food. Box office receipts are important business and entertainment stories. Sports, manufacturing, resources – everything impacts Bay and Wall Street just as much as Main Street. Take, for example, the recent $12 billion acquisition of Tim Horton’s by Burger King – and then the subsequent layoff of hundreds of people, said Katrycz. That’s not just a financial markets story. “There’s fascinating stories that appeal to all kinds of people not just to business people,” he added.
But, with our exploding non-linear media world, why launch a new TV channel (even if so much of the content is for the Bloomberg Terminal, its apps and digital news)? Millar thinks of business news as akin to sports. It has to be consumed live. “(Sports and business news) and to some extent live events, is something you have to watch live, because it’s ‘in the moment’. It’s not something you’re going to put on a shelf and you’re going to see repeats of. It doesn’t matter how good the show is today, you won’t be seeing that running a month from now. You have to create it new and it’s fresh, and audiences, when they can rely on you, come back to you all the time.”
“Competition is good, it’s the mantra of the day, and we are keen,” added Millar. “All we are after is a good fair competitive fight. Let the best service win.”
