Significant changes to the Canadian TV landscape coming in January

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Some significant changes to the Canadian television landscape are coming up in January, 2025.

As many of you may have heard, back in June, Rogers signed a deal with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery to acquire Canadian distribution rights and Canadian rights to HGTV, Food Network and the Discovery brands.  As a result, this had a major impact on Bell Media and Corus entertainment and will have a huge ripple effect on all the major players.

For Corus, they will lose the rights to the HGTV and Food Network names and content and will be launching the Home and Flavour networks as replacements.

Bell settled their legal differences with Rogers and still retain the rights to carry HBO content on Crave... but they lost the rights to the Discovery brand and content.  Animal Planet, Discovery Science and Discovery Velocity will be renamed CTV Wild, CTV Nature and CTV Speed, and Discovery will become "USA Network" and Investigation Discovery will become "Oxygen True Crime"

OWN ceased broadcasting back in September and Magnolia Network, Cooking Channel Canada, and MTV Canada are all scheduled to shut down at the end of this year.

Rogers still has not announced the relaunch of Discovery, HGTV or Food Network. Presumably Citytv+ will expand in scope and make WD/Discovery content available on-demand.

What remains to be seen is how this will impact carriage and to what extent it will further fracture the Canadian TV landscape. Start announced that they will be picking up Home and Flavour, dropping the channels that will cease broadcasting by their current owners at the end of this year, and have said nothing about picking up any of the new channels that Bell and Rogers plan to launch/relaunch in January. It's also unclear as to how customers of the major BDUs (e.g. Rogers, Bell, TELUS, SaskTel, Eastlink, etc.) will be impacted.

Meanwhile, more and more channels are being made available on Prime Video and/or as a standalone service. Netflix has also acquired exclusive rights to WWE content.

No news yet on how this will impact Ignite/Xfinity TV packages, past, present or future.  Nothing on https://www.rogers.com/support/tv/channel-updates  , and it still remains to be seen what announcements will come in our December bills.  Will also be interesting to see whether changes of this magnitude will allow Rogers customers, who are locked into long-term contracts, to cancel their service without penalty.

There is also no word as to how this will impact the legacy Digital TV service, or whether its shutdown will come anytime soon.

**Labels Updated**

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Just got an "Updates to your TV package" email:

We would like to share an update with you about your TV service.

Starting January 1, 2025, the Cooking Channel will no longer be aired by the broadcaster – but good news, you can continue to access your favourite Cooking Channel shows on-demand and on the Citytv+ app. You will be able to log into the Citytv+ app, at no additional cost, with your MyRogers credentials.

No doubt, we will be seeing more of these messages in the days and weeks ahead.

[Mdelcasale]

It seems Roger’s is getting very greedy and does not want to pay for content, but yet continue to raise rates. Value for money? I’d say not. This is the third or fourth channel dropped by Roger’s in the past year or two.
Could be time to change providers.

[ReneHache]

I've been following those change for a few months on Digital Home.

Also I read that there are rumors that Rogers also planing to remove these Corus channels too: DTOUR, DejaView, H2, MovieTime, Nat Geo Wild, Treehouse, YTV and Slice.

They better not removed YTV, that my #1 favorite channel. Without my famorites channels (my other favorite should be safe, for now), there's no reason to have cable.

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@ReneHache wrote:

I've been following those change for a few months on Digital Home.

Also I read that there are rumors that Rogers also planing to remove these Corus channels too: DTOUR, DejaView, H2, MovieTime, Nat Geo Wild, Treehouse, YTV and Slice.

They better not removed YTV, that my #1 favorite channel. Without my famorites channels (my other favorite should be safe, for now), there's no reason to have cable.

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It's more than just rumours.  A carriage dispute between Rogers and Corus has been going on for months, but it has also been kept surprisingly quiet.  As far as I know, it still has not been resolved.  Rogers wants to drop Corus' specialty channels that either "underperform" or compete with their own brands.

I suspect that Rogers wants to continue to carry W.  Nothing has been said about Home and Flavour.

Sadly, Corus is barely clinging to life.  Back in July, they issued a "going concern" warning in their quarterly financial results.  At that time, they were carrying something like C$1billion in long-term debt.  Last I checked, their stock was sitting at $0.11, and apparently they are exploring a potential sale of their business.  Even if they don't lose carriage, Corus' days may still be numbered.

[ReneHache]

It's really sad, specially that Corus channels are the ones I watch the most. I know you can get StackTV throu Rogers, hope that won't affect those, specially we have to pay extra if we want to subscribe to StackTV.
The CRTC need to change the rules to force all providers to carry all channels (that exist in Canada also US and International channels that are on the allow distribution list).
Not everyone watch the "popular stuff", some of us prefer and watch more niche/less popular content, and lot's of them are not available on streaming services).
I'm autistic with sensory issue, I only watch positive content, sadly they are becoming more rare and less and less common on TV, Cable channels these days seen to focus too much on mature, violence, crime contents...