TORONTO – When most people think of JR Shaw, it’s the cable business that first comes to mind since Shaw Cable and its sister satellite company Shaw Direct provide subscription TV service to over three million Canadians. But the executive chair of the company always been a big broadcast backer, too and he will be inducted into the Ontario Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame Thursday in Toronto.
People nowadays forget that when cable first launched in the 1950s and grew through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, there were precious few channels available to distribute to people, especially in Edmonton, where Shaw Cable got its start as Capital Cable. After cutting his teeth for a short while with a cable investment made by his father in Southwestern Ontario, JR struck out on his own in Edmonton, after helping run the family’s pipe coating business for a number of years (that company, ShawCor, run and grown for decades by JR’s late brother Les, is a world leader in its sector).
JR, now 79, got his first cable license in 1970 and began service in the Sherwood Park area in Edmonton in 1971. There were no specialty channels then, just a couple of allowed American signals and only a handful of off-air Canadian channels that viewers could sometimes receive off-air, or much more reliably receive via this new coaxial cable company. So, with little video choice, Shaw had to create its own content and launched its own local cable community access channel.
“The community channel was pretty important to us in Edmonton and when we did that we didn’t have a lot of choice in channels at that time so that’s what we were selling,” recalled Shaw in an interview with Cartt.ca this week. Later, Shaw Cable began to partner with local radio stations there, such as CISN Edmonton and CKGY Red Deer to provide live content on the channel, albeit audio. “We wanted to bring the voice of radio to the community channel and tie those two together and make a stronger community channel,” he said. Shaw would later come to own those stations.
As Shaw grew and bought other cable outfits and broadcasters, a different mix of assets sometimes came with it, including radio stations and specialty channels. One of Shaw’s biggest mid-1990s purchases was its acquisition of CUC Broadcasting (which did business on the cable side under the Trillium brand name) and with that came a one-third ownership of early specialty service YTV which, as it turns out, would be the seed of what would later become Corus Entertainment.
“When we bought CUC along came 34% ownership of YTV. Rogers was in there and so were a lot of producers. It ended up being 50/50 with Rogers and we really wanted to get into programming. We missed a chance or two before that and I didn’t like myself for missing that opportunity. So I said to Ted one day, ‘I’m not sure what you’re going to do with YTV, but I can tell you that from our point of view, our ownership of YTV will never be for sale’,” Shaw recalled.
The company bought 100% of YTV in 1996 but in 1998, the CRTC told the industry it wanted to put a lid on deals which saw content and distribution companies come together – by denying Shaw’s attempt to purchase half of nascent sports service Headline Sports (which would become The Score and which is now Rogers Sportsnet 360). At the time, Shaw also owned CMT, Treehouse, DMX Music, and minority stakes in Comedy Network, Telelatino and Teletoon. “The CRTC said you can still own what (TV channels) you’ve got, but you can’t grow them,” he said.
So, in 1999, Shaw spun off its content business into a separate company and Corus Entertainment was born, “and I think John Cassaday and his whole team at have done a bang up job,” Shaw added.
However as times changed and the global media landscape began to shift immensely, vertical integration began to come into vogue so that content and distribution were able to come together under a more flexible Regulator which allowed the deals, while building in safeguards. While Corus grew into a specialty, pay TV and radio powerhouse on its own, Shaw turned its sights on the struggling broadcast and specialty media company Canwest Global and purchased it out of bankruptcy protection in 2010.
“It was a little daunting trying to deal with all these people and the debt holders in New York and then Goldman Sachs,” Shaw recalled. “It kind of felt like you’re out of your league for sure… But one thing happened after another and it all fell into place. We’re pretty pleased with what we got. The operation was very good and the people are excellent.”
In this day and age more than ever, he added, Shaw needs content and not just the wires to deliver it. “It’s kind of like going to a ball game when you got a glove but you don’t have the ball or bat,” he said about missing that piece of the media game. “We like content. We’ve got the pipes and we think we can do something with it,” he added, pointing to the company’s new TV Everywhere products, Shaw Go and Global Go as how the company is pushing its content onto other, newer platforms.
“I’m sure if we didn’t have vertical integration, that would not have happened,” he added.
With all that Shaw Communications does and is today, the founder acknowledges the job his son (CEO Brad) does is far different than what he faced when building Shaw in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. “The company is big and sophisticated. We’ve got tons of employees, but we’ve got as good a management team as I think we have ever had,” he said. “The business wasn’t as complicated then as it is today. We didn’t have the tiers and we didn’t have the Internet, we didn’t have telephone when I first started out. We just had basic cable and extra revenue came from a second outlet or installation fees.
“But it still boils down to people and if you get the right people with the right attitude with the teamwork and it’s no different than the horses out of St. Louis. If they’re all in step, you’re all going the same direction and got a lot more power to get things done,” he added. “I think Brad is a people person, better than Jim and I, and he brings that team along and we just got depth that I’ve never experienced before right now.
“There is nothing that’s ever accomplished by yourself.”
