Announced today, the CBC will be selling off bold, the drama, comedy, sports, and arts and culture channel.
http://cbc.radio-canada.ca/site/budget/en/
http://cbc.radio-canada.ca/site/budget/en/More specifically, CBC/Radio-Canada will sell bold, one of CBC's specialty digital TV channels, as its licence conditions no longer fit the Corporation's strategy nor complement the other programming streams.
In 2010, I believe Bold had just over 1 million subscribers, so I doubt that it was a "dragon" killer in 2011. Skating can only take you so far, but I do recall that Bold used to air reruns of the cancelled 2005 Fox TV series The Inside (which I watched online many years ago -- currently on YouTube), starring the lovely, Rachel Nichols (soon to be seen on the Showcase TV series Continuum, debuting May 27). Live from Abbey Road is another show I occasionally watch on Bold, so although I'm not really upset that Bold might be rebranded, I still think that there are far worse Canadian specialty channels out there that need to be killed first.For the first nine months of 2011-2012:
Specialty services, which include subscription and advertising revenue from the Corporation’s CBC News Network, bold, documentary, ARTV and the Réseau de l’information de Radio-Canada (RDI), generated $124.6 million (approximately nine per cent of total revenue and sources of funds).
If you would like to discuss the à la carte topic in detail, I also posted the above link in the appropriate thread:April 6, 2012
A lot still has to be determined at the arbitration stage. If the wholesale rate on the penetration-based rate card is too high, small cable companies won't take advantage of it to offer consumers more choice. If it's low enough that it makes sense to offer more packaging choice, we might see other cable and satellite providers try à la carte models. Currently choosing channels that way is available only in Quebec, and really only because of competitive pressure from Videotron that has forced Bell and Cogeco to do the same in Quebec but not elsewhere. Bell and Rogers both come out against more packaging flexibility for consumers, saying it's either too complicated or consumers aren't interested in it. (Bell Media even said at the hearing, when speaking of allowing Videotron to move to an à la carte model: "In hindsight, I wish that horse could be put back in the barn.")
But while the CRTC could have taken a strong stand in favour of consumer choice, it decided instead to stay on the side of some of the biggest money-makers in Canada. Channels like TSN, Space and Discovery are hardly in financial distress. Instead, they are the most profitable specialty channels and each make millions of dollars every year. Still, the CRTC has decided that it's okay for big companies like Bell Media to impose minimum levels of subscribers for these channels, which means if not enough consumers choose them, cable and satellite companies can be forced to add them to basic packages and charge people for the channels whether they want them or not.
If there's one bright spot, it's that the CRTC believes that there's an adjustment period here, and that eventually these specialty services will have to stand on their own two feet without this crutch of a minimum subscriber base. By the time of the next contract in a few years, all cable and satellite companies could be entirely free of contractual headaches that put limits on packaging flexibility, and consumer choice could reign.
-------------ASPER: I’d like to grow faster than we are. It’s nice growth but to enable us to buy more and better content we need to be in the 1.3 million to 1.5 million range. That means changing a package. You can be in a package that 50,000 people get or be in a package that 1 million people get. One negotiation that gets you from one package to the other suddenly expands significantly the number of homes (you have access to). We need to move closer to the packages that have the TSNs and the Scores and the Sportsnets and away from the bleachers and the cheap seats.
Source: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Le...ight+Network/5019819/story.html#ixzz1rHGNucls"I'd like to think we'll be in eight million homes by that time," he says. "We’ll have 100 live hours of programming this year, from Japanese MMA to European kickboxing, boxing to Canadian mixed martial arts and Japanese mixed martial arts, and that's going to continue to rise. We certainly have a long way to go, but we're on the upward swing. We're bringing on marketing people, online people. We're talking to producers about bringing aboard more local original programming than there is now so there's not so much repetition."