Videotron to launch independent channel on September 1st
MONTREAL — Earlier this year, Sylvain Gagné said he was ready to give up on his dream.
“That was my last shot", the Callisto Television Corp. president told Cartt.ca in a recent interview. “I was saying to myself if I don’t get any attention or any agreement I will give up. For me, that was really frustrating. I spent the past four years trying to get that off the ground. If I don’t succeed, that will be four years wasted.”
His dream is Terror TV, a specialty channel devoted to horror films, which caters to a niche market that has been unserved in Canada since Corus ended the Dusk channel in 2012 (and, really, since the Scream channel was rebranded as Dusk three years earlier, dropping pure horror in favour of more supernatural and suspense).
Gagné said that he knew there was a market for this content because he has experience in the field.
“I was with Lionsgate Quebec at the end of the 1990s,” he said. “My job was to go to festivals around the world and acquire programming. There were all these horror films that we’d pay almost nothing for.”
The films were added to on-demand video platforms like Bell ExpressVu.
“We had the returns of $10,000, $15,000 for these films,” he continued. “I told myself there’s definitely a market for this.”
His plan was to create two channels, one in each language, hire a small staff and broadcast these movies commercial-free. Acquiring programming wasn’t difficult. CRTC approval also wasn’t hard — that came in 2014 for the French channel. But TV distributors weren’t eager to add it. The CRTC’s Let’s Talk TV process was under way, and, Gagné said, the providers wanted to wait until the end of that process to find out how things would work before adding any new independent channels.
Gagné was about to lose hope when he finally got one to pay attention. Videotron, the largest cable provider in Quebec, decided that it would go ahead and add the French service, Frissons TV. It will launch on September 1.
Magali Iovino, director of marketing, packaging and business models at Videotron, said that an analysis of its own video-on-demand library showed a high demand for this kind of programming. And she was impressed by the reaction to Frissons TV’s trailer. “In five days there were 100,000 views,” she said.
“It’s a channel that reinforces our position at the head of the francophone market,” Iovino added, particularly among youth. “We always want to support channels that come from here.”
Three years ago, when first speaking to Cartt.ca, Gagné said the business model wouldn’t work for a French channel alone. But that was before commissioning a survey to gauge demand. “Our survey proved us wrong,” he said. “It’s very viable for the French channel only.”
The survey showed 45 per cent of the target audience is in the 18-34 demographic.
“As for the English channel, we’re still hoping to launch it somewhere in 2018. At the time it’s not our main concern”, continued Gagné.
Frissons TV will announce its programming lineup this week, and titles will range from the 1930s to the present, with movies like Night of the Living Dead, Curse of Frankenstein and They Found Hell. And they’ll stick tight to the genre — “maybe extreme thriller” but that’s as far as they’ll stray. The channel will also have three original programs by next year, one featuring short films and interviews with their creators, one with behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and one will be a weekly comedy/horror magazine-style show.
The channel won’t have any ads, either during the movies or between them. “We did the numbers,” Gagné said. “The money you can make, with all the expenses and the money at the end, we said it’s not worth it.”
Frissons TV has five permanent employees, plus three more on contract. Gagné said it was with the help of his team that he soldiered on to get this channel off the ground. “You doubt yourself at one point. You go back and talk to your people and they say ‘no it’s a great idea, go ahead.’ You push and you push.”
“Never give up, that’s what I learned. The numbers speak for themselves.”
Frissons TV is scheduled to launch September 1 on Videotron on channel 799 in HD, and be available in free preview until November 18. After that it will be available in custom packages or as an à la carte service priced at $5 a month. Negotiations continue with other TV distributors.
