TORONTO – Randy Lennox says he promised when first joining Bell Media from Universal Music Canada not to "do change for change's sake."
But scale for scale's sake?
Bulking up by bringing top U.S. premium brands like HBO, Starz, Showtime, Bloomberg and iHeartRadio into Bell Media's Canadian content tent has made size a strategy at the Toronto-based media titan. "We are committed to becoming the Canadian custodian of scalable world brands,” Bell Media CEO Lennox told Cartt.ca on Thursday ahead of his Upfront presentation in Toronto.
But the focus at Bell Media isn't on bulkiness, or even synergies, but on leveraging new business opportunities.
"With that (scale) come co-production opportunities," Lennox adds after discussing deal-making with studio heads at the recent Los Angeles screenings, possibly bringing new U.S. series to shoot inside Pinewood Toronto Studios, which Bell Media now runs, and possibly taking ownership stakes in new studio shows.
"The reason we bought Pinewood, and are going to expand it dramatically, is not just for the business, but for the conversation," he explained.
Also in Hollywood, Sony Pictures Television this year shopped The Launch, Bell Media's reality music competition series, to around 60 countries as a format play. At a time when much of the Canadian TV industry feels besieged, Bell Media is no longer just a vertically-integrated giant intent on buying up rivals to get the industry down to a few surviving players.
During its recent Hollywood shopping expedition, Lennox and his team were both a traditional buyer of U.S. series and, significantly, a new seller of their own product. "We were horse-trading both for studio space leveraged against co-productions, The Launch as an international format, and we had meetings on the live television broadcast of the Bat Out of Hell (live stage show)," Lennox reported.
His rivals have their own favored, and exclusive, relationships to secure premium content for the Canadian market – the NHL and FX with Rogers Media, and HGTV, Food Network and others for Corus Entertainment, but it turns out answering the call of Bay Street investors to just get bigger to survive has turned out to be fool’s gold for many.
That includes Corus Entertainment, which has seen its share price and enterprise value plunge since acquiring Shaw Media for $2.65 billion in 2016, and the jury is still out on whether Rogers Media made the right call with its $5.2 billion bet on the NHL.
Bell Media has put its focus on what it regards as premium scale to grow at home, and abroad. "We're looking for reciprocal deals from international companies, we're the custodians of (premium brands) and we're trying to trade IP internationally," Lennox explained.
He's quick to say new U.S. series pick-ups of Rookie and The Alec Baldwin Show remain the lifeblood of Bell Media for being able to reach mass consumers on the main CTV networks.
However, innovation like the new CTV digital "super-hub" of seven services, including specialty channel rebrands and ad-supported VOD services, aims to get Bell Media aggressively expanding its digital offerings as it goes up against global competitors like Netflix and Apple.
In a Canadian market where around 40% of Canadians are without a TV subscription and watch video on an Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku or Firestick platform, Bell Media has gone beyond GO apps for individual brands like Space, Bravo and Comedy to consolidating those channels into a CTV-branded offerings.
To hear Mike Cosentino, president, programming and content, tell it, a new future for CTV is at hand, where one digital offering takes the place (finally?) of traditional specialty channel brands. "Think of the CraveTV, or Netflix application of CTV, with a marquee shows and CTV Sci-Fi, CTV Drama, CTV Comedy and CTV Life – it's a super-hub," he told Cartt.ca.
In a revamp of the user experience, no longer do Canadians have to go to the Bravo app to stream The Handmaid's Tale, or to the Space app to watch Star Trek: Discovery. Now there will be one destination as Bell Media doubles down on the CTV brand.
"It's a scale strategy and it's time to take a global approach to our brands," he added of CTV suddenly becoming a ubiquitous brand on Apple TV and other digital platforms, right beside Netflix and CBS All-Access.
The CTV super-hub will launch as an authenticated service so Bell Media subscribers can view content live and on-demand, but execs at the broadcaster aren't ruling out CTV digital super-hub going direct-to-consumer at some point down the road.
In the meantime, Bell Media is set to roll-out two new ad-supported VOD services, CTV Movies and CTV Vault, to be made available regardless of authentication.
