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**
@ReneHache wrote:
New Rogers version starting to show up on Zap2it
This list is based with a Toronto postal code (M5V 3L9)
New HGTV on 47
New Food on 49
New Discovery on 59
New ID on 72
New Magnolia on 89/331 (same as original)
I'm guessing if Rogers is keeping the rebranded ones, they will stay at there original digits.
... and despite Rogers' protests, Home and Flavour launched today on channels 35 and 52.
It's looking promising that Rogers will carry the new and rebranded Bell channels on their old channel numbers.
@ReneHache wrote:
I did a complete scan this morning and this are the 3 digits for the new Rogers and Corus rebranded channels for Rogers Xfinity:
242 : Food Network
243 : HGTV
244 : Discovery
309 : Home Network
314 : Flavour Network
341 : ID
331 : Magnolia (stay at the same spot)
The Bell's rebranded will also stay on the same spot.
The ones that start on Jan 01, won't showup on the guide yet, but you can manually go to the channel or use CH+/- (there will be a comming Jan 01 message).
You can see new Rogers channels in the "All Channels" view in the Guide.
49 / 242 - Food Network
57 / 243 - HGTV
59 / 244 - Discovery
63 / 341 - Investigation Discovery
89 / 331 - Magnolia
The new Corus Channels are:
35 / 309 - Home
52 / 314 - Flavour
The Bell Channels (Discover, Discovery Science, Discovery Velocity, etc.) are still broadcasting on their current channel numbers and presumably will keep broadcasting on the same channels, with their new names, in the new year.
Update: https://www.rogers.com/support/tv/channel-updates has now been updated with the latest updates.
@ReneHache wrote:
^^
I'm a little confuse about one thing, I have Discovery Science as a Flex, will that Flex automatically be replace with CTV Nature? Or should I Flex it out with an other channel so that I don't loose a "slot"?
I guess the same for Velicity to CTV Speed and Animal Planet to CTV Wild.
As far as I know, the only channels that will soon cease broadcasting and not be replaced by other channels are MTV and Cooking Channel. If you subscribe to those, you will need to swap those out.
If you are subscribed to Discovery Science, since the channel will continue on under a new name, my guess is that if you do not take any action, you will continue to receive CTV Nature in the new year.
The situation with Discovery is a bit more murky. My guess is that if you take no action, you will continue to receive USA Network in the new year. I do not think that it will be replaced with the new Discovery.
The TV channel lineup changes and service updates page is also very unhelpful when it comes to explaining whether or not you will need to exchange Flex Channels:
Rogers XfinityTV customers with existing Flex Channels:
If you currently have one of the discontinued channels in your Flex 5, Flex 10, or Flex 20+ Sports plan, please select the Popular or Premier TV package and replace it with another channel.
You can exchange Flex Channels once every 30 days by signing into MyRogers and selecting TV for new options.
I do not even know how to process that.
Under the circumstances, I think it would be great if Rogers could allow unlimited Flex Channel channel swaps during the month of January to allow customers to sort their subscriptions out.
Hopefully, @CommunityHelps can also confirm whether or not what I posted is correct,
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