OTTAWA – Leveraging a long line of food and lifestyle programming already under his belt, Chris Knight is taking his next gig, Gusto TV, to the Canadian TV masses this week.
With shows like Cook Like a Chef, Licence to Grill, The Great Canadian Food Show and Road Grill part of Knight’s pedigree Gusto is “a natural extension” to what he was already doing. The concept behind the channel came in 2009, when as he says, he looked at media concentration that was taking place then and realized “I was running out of guys to make TV shows for.”
Thus was born Gusto. “We saw broadcasting as the natural evolution of what we were already doing,” Knight tells Cartt.ca in an interview. He just didn’t think it would take five years to come to fruition. The Ottawa-based channel now employs 14 people.
Knight credits his tenacity – being Scottish, Roman Catholic and a Taurus – proving all those people who told him he was out his mind, wrong.
“You tell me I can’t do something, I’m likely going to go out and do it. I had no idea it would take five years but here we are. We’re about to launch Canada’s newest independent lifestyle food channel to extremely broad distribution,” he says. The channel launches Wednesday on Bell TV to begin with.
With only one food-oriented TV channel on Canadian dials, Shaw Media’s popular Food Network, there was certainly an opportunity for one more. “Sure, there is the odd show on one channel or the other, but I think most Canadians think of one place for food and food programming,” he says, adding that Gusto can fill that dearth of food programming in Canada.
Mobile, streaming and video on demand will be important elements of Gusto’s strategy. As Knight says, “we don’t care where you watch us just as long as you’re watching us.” The television everywhere concept wasn’t talked about back in 2009 “when we started this merry adventure,” but it is now pretty pervasive and thus needed to be built into the Gusto platform.
“So we are mobile ready. We are livestream ready, none of our programming is encumbered for VOD, so we stand at the ready to work with our BDU partners and push all of our content through to all of the platforms whether it’s mobile, or livestreaming,” he says.
“I was running out of guys to make TV shows for.” – Chris Knight
At launch, Gusto will be available to well over two million households and that figure is expected to grow considerably over the coming months as the company finalizes carriage agreements with additional BDUs, Knight added.
Describing the negotiations with the other distributors as “well along”, Gusto is holding conversations with cablecos such as Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications, EastLink, the Canadian Cable Systems Alliance (CCSA) and Cogeco Cable.
“We are literally at the contract, the paperwork level with some. We are working furiously to get EastLink up and running by December 11. We finished our master agreement contract with CCSA so we hope that other members will follow EastLink’s lead and come on board over the next couple of months,” Knight says. More meetings with Cogeco will take place in January and there was a meeting with Rogers last week, he adds.
Gusto’s launch comes at an interesting juncture in Canadian broadcasting. There is more media concentration than ever and the federal government is pushing a pick-and-pay channel environment. Despite this, Knight believes the channel is poised for success.
Even at a time when there is significant concentration of media in Canada, an independent broadcaster in Canada is an “appreciating asset,
” Knight says. On the pick and pay channel front, he’s happy to go up against any other channel. “As for pick and we’ll see what happens a couple years down the road. I’d be more than happy to put Gusto up against any other channel out there as long as it’s even playing field,” he says.
There has been resounding success on the advertising front for Gusto, as well. Originally projected to be at about 35% of budget, “I’m now expecting us to come in around 65% of budget at launch,” says Knight. Those numbers could get even better as he has recently met with the agency that represents Loblaw’s and Kraft.
Knight acknowledges that Ottawa is an unusual place to launch a TV channel – the city doesn’t have the infrastructure as Toronto or Montreal – but says the lifestyle certainly makes up for. Besides, he adds dryly, there’s “20 flights a day to Toronto.”
Editor's Note: This story has been edited from the original version to amend a quotation in which the reporter and interview subject disagreed.
