TORONTO – The last remaining Toronto independent cable holdout has decided to sell to the big red machine.
Rogers Cable announced this afternoon that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Aurora Cable, subject to CRTC approval. Aurora Cable provides cable television, Internet and telephony services in the Town of Aurora and the community of Oak Ridges, in Richmond Hill, Ontario.
(Ed Note: While the purchase price was not release by either company, Aurora serves approximately 16,000 customers, offering cable, digital cable, high speed Internet and voice in a wealthy demographic. Using a conservative guesstimate of $2500 per subscriber, that would make the Aurora system worth about $40 million.)
"We are delighted with the acquisition of Aurora Cable and enthusiastically welcome Aurora and Oak Ridges residents to Rogers where we know they will enjoy the extensive selection of services that we offer our customers," said Edward Rogers, president of Rogers Cable, in the press release. "Aurora Cable is an excellent system, a perfect fit with our existing systems in and around the Greater Toronto Area, and it offers great synergies within our existing Ontario cable cluster."
"We are proud of the successful cable operations we have built in and around Aurora and there isn’t a more logical or higher-quality service provider than Rogers who could take ownership of them," added Jim Irvine who founded Aurora Cable some 43 years ago. "Given the common borders of our companies’ cable systems and Rogers’ expansive array of information, communications and entertainment offerings, this is a tremendous opportunity for our customers and for our companies alike."
As we have reported previously, Rogers has often made purchase offers to Irvine for this system – one of the more progressive cablecos in the country – and were always rebuffed. However, late last summer, Rogers asked the CRTC for a license to overbuild in Aurora, which signaled a bit of a more hardball tone to the mostly collegial cable relationships operators have enjoyed in the past.
