Article from Fagstein.
https://blog.fagstein.com/2019/10/29/bell-purchase-v-hearing
https://blog.fagstein.com/2019/10/29/bell-purchase-v-hearing
Bell Media is proposing to bring V’s local news broadcasts in-house, but otherwise isn’t putting much substantive on the table to convince the CRTC it should be allowed to acquire the V network of television stations in Quebec for $20 million.
The CRTC published the application on Tuesday, setting a hearing date of Feb. 12 in Montreal to hear the application. Bell is proposing to buy the five V stations (CFAP-DT Quebec City, CFJP-DT Montreal, CFRS-DT Saguenay, CFKS-DT Sherbrooke and CFKM-DT Trois-Rivières), plus digital assets like Noovo.ca, but leave the specialty channels Elle Fictions (formerly MusiquePlus) and MAX (formerly Musimax) to a yet-to-be-named company owned by the current owners of V.
V’s affiliate stations in Gatineau, Abitibi, Rimouski and Rivière-du-Loup, owned by RNC Media and Télé Inter-Rives, are unaffected by the transaction, and Bell says it intends to renew its affiliation agreements with them when they expire in 2020.
In the brief included in the application, Bell and V say the conventional TV network is continuing to lose money, despite the ratings gains it has generated and the synergies from owning two specialty channels (which Bell had to sell off to get its acquisition of Astral Media approved in 2013). Groupe V Média says it has lost almost $7 million in the past two years.
“For a small independent broadcaster in the Quebec market, these losses cannot be supported and have begun to have an impact on its other services,” the application says.
Malgré ces efforts, Groupe V Média n’a pas suffisamment stabilisé la situation financière de ces stations. Le secteur de la télévision traditionnelle est précaire. Les revenus sont en baisse depuis un certain temps et les stations perdent de l’argent. Ces problèmes ne sont pas cycliques, ils sont structurels. Ce sont des défis qui touchent tous les exploitants de télévision traditionnelle.
Après un examen attentif, Groupe V Média a déterminé qu’elle ne peut plus assumer les pertes des Stations V et que ces services seraient mieux positionnés pour assurer leur succès futur s’ils faisaient partie d’un portefeuille plus vaste de services de langue française et d’une entité intégrée telle que Bell Média.