TORONTO – Citytv Toronto will leave its long-time home inside the CHUMCity building within three years as part of Rogers Media’s deal to buy the Toronto station and four others across the country.
Announced yesterday, Rogers has signed a deal to acquire Citytvs in Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver for $375 million from CTVglobemedia. The new deal nullifies the Rogers purchase of the A Channels from CTV, which will now hold on to those assets.
The agreement came together rather quickly, since the CRTC only announced its decision on Friday. The two companies were able to move at such speed because a lot of the heavy lifting had already been done, said Rogers Broadcasting president Rael Merson in an interview with Cartt.ca. “We had spent a lot of time on the A Channel acquisition. We had gone through a full process of bidding and a whole process of negotiations and contracts… (and) they had to come back to us to extract themselves from the prior (A Channel) deal,” he said.
“They told us on Friday morning they were going to sell them and we mustered a bid by Friday night and in fact got the deal done late last night,” added Merson. As for other unregulated assets like CHUM Interactive and CHUM International, both are going to CTV.
However, the $375 million purchase price might sound high to some, given that the high-end valuation CTV provided to CRTC in its application to buy CHUM only valued the five Citytv stations at a paltry $150 million.
Merson, diplomatically, explained it this way: “When you buy something you’re interested in, you do it based on what you think you can do with them going forward versus what they have done in the past… So we built our own models of what we can do with the stations, how well we think we can do with them… We think we paid a fair price based on what we thought potential we think the stations have.”
The ownership transition won’t be an easy move since Torontonians identify Citytv and its wide open studio space – where news stand-ups are often shot in the hallways or sitting on desks or on the sidewalk in front of the 299 Queen St. W. landmark – as part and parcel with the gothic building itself.
“It’s going to be a challenge, but we’ve committed to moving City out of that building within three years,” said Merson. “So, we’re going to have to figure all of this out in the next two to three years.”
What will be hard is to find an equally compelling local spot for the station. Rogers has a pair of existing options: Sliding Citytv into the broadcasting hub on Lakeshore where OMNI is situated, or squeezing it into the RCI 333 Bloor St. E. campus.
(Ed note: Since Rogers plans to retain the local, street-level approach to Citytv, both of those options have big limitations. The OMNI broadcast centre is separated from the downtown core by the Gardiner Expressway and the streetfront is busy, nondescript, Lakeshore Avenue. At the Bloor and Mount Pleasant head office, RCI sits on the edge of the downtown core with limited streetfront options. Plus, it’s a little too corporate for the Citytv image.)
“We’ve got nothing obvious or available right now,” added Merson of potential real estate. “So, we really need to get our heads around it. We know that the business is fundamentally urban. It needs to be downtown, it needs to reflect the local communities so all of that is going to guide our thinking on where and how to move.”
Speaking of move, one of the major questions bounding around the Banff TV Fest is what will happen to the various CHUM programming and the multiple overlaps where shows that appear on City one month appear on Star! the next. FashionTelevision has been a staple program on Citytv for ages, for example, but the show’s staff built and populate FashionTelevisionChannel, which is being retained by CTV. In the other direction, Cityline is produced by Citytv and airs on the A Channels, which will be owned by CTV.
The programming, said Merson, “was probably the toughest part of our discussions. We broke it up into four categories and we said the stuff that is completely attributable to any one operation will remain with that operation. If it is shared, we’ll look at it and we’ll make a determination about which operation it dominantly relates to and that operation will continue to produce the program, continue to own the program, but will sublicense the program to the other user.”
The same will go for acquired programming that airs on multiple stations.
So, FT is going to CTV along with the channel while BreakfastTelevision and Cityline will be sublicensed to the A Channels from Rogers-owned Citytv, said Merson, meaning CHUM FM host Marilyn Denis will have two employers. “We will look philosophically where these (homemade) programs predominantly belong to with the ability to sublicense to the other party,” said Merson. “We’ll have the same philosophy with respect to acquired programming.”
As for the splits in the other cities, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, Rogers is staying and CTV is going as it has the same three year window to pull its radio stations out of the buildings, “or negotiate a new deal with us,” said Merson.
