Looks like CHCH is going all news plus movies format........
Channel Zero buys two E! stations from Canwest; plans major programming upgrades
June 30, 2009
By Greg O’Brien
http://www.cartt.ca/news/FullStory.cfm?NewsNo=8231
TORONTO, HAMILTON and MONTREAL – We’re about to find out if a specialty service model (all-news plus movies) will work on an over-the-air station.
As first reported by Cartt.ca, independent specialty service operator Channel Zero is about to get a whole lot bigger. The company which owns short film specialty Movieola, classic movie channel Silver Screen Classics, film distributor Ouat Media (plus a majority stake in the AOV adult channel brands) announced this afternoon they have signed an agreement to purchase E!-branded CHCH TV Hamilton and CJNT TV Montreal from Canwest Global.
Terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed but the official press release says all employees will be keeping their jobs. The news comes after months of negotiations since Canwest originally indicated back in January that the five-station group is on the block. The stations in the two largest markets drew the most attention and the sale is pending CRTC and union approvals.
The fate of Canwest’s E!-branded stations in Red Deer, Alta. (CHCA) and Kelowna (CHBC) and Victoria, B.C. (CHEK) are not known at this time. While Canwest is thought to be seeking buyers for those, company executives have gone on record saying Canwest will not be operating the E! stations as of September 1, 2009 and the company is running out of time.
The sale of the stations is part of the troubled Canwest’s attempt at righting its debt-laden ship and divesting of assets it no longer considers to be core to its operations (like E!, and Network Ten Australia. The company has already sold radio groups in the U.K. And Turkey). Today is also another deadline day for the big media (Global TV, newspapers, specialties) company where it was to finish an agreement in principle with its new lenders and existing bondholders to recapitalize the entire operation.
(Ed note: Because we have followed this story so closely over the past many months, any more links would be simply too many. Please search “Canwest” or “Asper” on Cartt.ca for additional background on this ongoing story.)
“We’re really excited,” Channel Zero’s vice-president and general manager Cal Millar told Cartt.ca in an interview prior to the official announcement to employees which Cartt.ca agreed to embargo until E! network staff were officially informed at 12:35 today.
“Without question the value in CHCH Hamilton is it is a very valuable local station with a very effective newsgathering organization.”
“It’s important to viewers,” he added, noting that almost 15,000 supporters had signed a Facebook petition to save the station. “And that’s just the people who are on Facebook and cared enough. It has huge community support and that says – as we position it as an ‘all-news-all-day’ station – it’s going to have really strong local support.”
The privately financed deal to purchase the stations in Hamilton and Montreal will see Channel Zero’s size jump from about 40 employees to over 180, but that doesn’t mean the company is going to hold back on anything. The E! branding – which was a failure from a “man on the street” viewpoint in Hamilton, will soon be gone. CZ also plans to push full speed ahead on high definition and launch a new over-the-air TV model, repositioning and reprogramming CHCH Hamilton as an all-local-news station during daylight hours with movies at night. Think newscasts plus CP24, from dawn until 8 p.m. and known titles such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Sting and The Blues Brothers in prime time and overnight.
The new owners plan keep the successful morning show, supper newscast and late evening newscast but when it comes to movies, something Channel Zero knows well, “they’re not going to be first run conventional window movies. These are going to be ‘comfort food’ movies – not old movies necessarily, but movies that are familiar, have a high degree of title recognition with them,” said Millar.
Cable nets have had success adding these types of titles to their prime time line-ups (Spike showed The Phantom Menace last night and A&E ran The Godfather trilogy earlier this year, for examples) and Millar is convinced the prime time movie programming will work. “That’s one of the key consumer insights we came to with this,” he said.
“While we were in this process I was sitting watching TV at night flipping around and I came across The Blues Brothers. The DVD is in the drawer but it was on TV, I felt like watching it, it hit me the right way and I watched it right to the end.”
In Montreal, where CJNT is a multicultural station (and the station where the E! branding made the absolute least sense) it will also be significantly changed and broadcast both original foreign movies and multicultural music videos, with vibrant, fresh multicultural hosts. Millar says film distribution arm Ouat had often turned down foreign language flicks, “but now we have an outlet for them,” he said.
Millar says Channel Zero has been negotiating with Canwest since the winter and he’s pleased to finally have signed on the dotted line because both he and his financial backers (who he declined to name, but added they are not venture capitalists. “We all saw Drew Craig lose his company because of that,” added Millar) are excited about the programming format for CHCH and CJNT.
“We are buying stations we think are just absolute gems that are a little bit rusty in spots, a little rough in spots, but really truly gems and our job is to take them and polish them,” he said.
When it comes to CHCH Hamilton (and it looks as though the branding will revert back to its historical call letters) Channel Zero will keep what works (news) and jettison everything else (American prime time programming and even the simultaneous substitution that the large broadcasters say they can’t live without).
“This will be an over-the-air station but not a conventional station,” said Millar. “The idea that you program to dayparts and people buy ads on that... the advertising community still believes in that but we don’t.
“We think it’s far more exciting to take the learnings and the growth that have come from specialty – where viewers know what they’re going to get when they tune in – and apply it to a distribution technology that’s available to everybody.”
Multi-platform news will also be a major thrust, added Millar. He wants to see CHCH as the “news station for everything west of the Humber River” where the station is providing video traffic updates to their commuting viewers’ smart phones, for example, or making the newscasts available on demand, on cable and on line.
The news won’t be a full on 24/7 news wheel, however. There will be newscasts. “I doubt very much we’re going to muck with the success of the morning show, for example,” he said. Millar is also a fan of Live at Five, the supper hour news and the 11 o’clock news.
And, Millar also added Channel Zero’s business plan works with or without the Local Programming Improvement Fund, the rules for which the industry is waiting for are coming out Monday.
In the end, though, “the tactical execution of it will come from people in Hamilton who know what they’re doing... we’re rank amateurs at news.”
When it comes to conventional TV though, their regulations bind them to showing “priority programming” which isn’t just local content. It’s about Canadian made drama and comedy too. Millar is hopeful that because these are single stations, CHCH and CJNT won’t be bound to air that sort of Canadian content.
“Priority programming is really a ‘station group’ requirement and since we are not a station group, it’s our understanding we won’t be held to that,” he said.
Millar is also hopeful that the CRTC will see things Channel Zero’s way and speed approvals through the Commission, because August 31st is fast approaching. “We’re prepared to live with the current conditions of license on both of those stations,” adds Millar.
There are also pension issues to sort out between the union and Canwest prior to the deal being officially consummated. “Conditions of the sale include Canwest securing an extension of CHCH’s collective agreement with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP),” reads the press release.
More to come...
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