2007 Canadian broadcast television realignment
In 2006, following the death of longtime chairman Allan Waters, CHUM Limited decided to cease operations and sell its broadcasting assets to a willing bidder.
By September, CTV had radically altered the system's schedule to give A-Channel broadcast rights to several series that CTV had not been able to find time slots for on its own fall schedule, including Two and a Half Men, Scrubs, 30 Rock and the Canadian-produced series Jeff Ltd.
Shortly afterward, Multivan entered a tentative deal to sell CHNM to Rogers, citing the loss of the Calgary and Edmonton licenses as leaving the company no longer able to compete as a standalone station.
On September 7, 2007, Canwest Global rebranded its CH television system as E!,[8] following an agreement it struck with Comcast – then the parent company of the E!
cable channel in the United States (now owned by Comcast division NBCUniversal) – which saw the two broadcasters share certain programming.
Simultaneously, the system's six owned-and-operated stations restored the use of call signs as branding (a decision was made at least in part to avoid confusion with the entertainment news program E!
[9][10] Red Deer, Alberta O&O CHCA-TV (channel 6) was also granted permission to increase its transmitter power to reach its signal into Edmonton and Calgary, a request that the CRTC had previously denied.
television system in August 2009 citing that "a second conventional TV network [was] no longer key to the long-term success" of Canwest; E!
[17] BCE Inc. would eventually regain full control of CTV's broadcasting arm in April 2011, with CTVglobemedia being rebranded as Bell Media.
system's shutdown, the Jim Pattison Group signed an agreement with Rogers Communications to affiliate the company's three E!-affiliated stations – CFJC-TV (channel 4) in Kamloops, British Columbia, CKPG-TV (channel 2) in Prince George, British Columbia, and CHAT-TV (channel 6) in Medicine Hat, Alberta – with Citytv that September, expanding that system's reach into Western Canada[19] (as part of a long-term affiliation renewal agreement signed with Rogers in May 2012, the Pattison stations began carrying 90% of the primetime programming and the majority of morning and daytime programs from the programming grid of Vancouver O&O CKVU-DT in September of that year, which included simulcasts of the Vancouver edition of Citytv's morning show franchise Breakfast Television; although the Pattison stations continued to produce midday and evening local newscasts, unlike CKVU, which dropped all of its other newscasts outside of Breakfast Television in 2006, shortly before the CHUM sale[20]).
Rogers Media decided to broaden Citytv's national coverage, and transform it from a system into a television network, through the purchases of two other broadcasters; on January 17, 2012, Rogers purchased provincial educational cable channel Saskatchewan Communications Network from Bluepoint Investment Group (which following the private equity firm's purchase of the channel the previous year, had already begun incorporating entertainment programming during the late-afternoon and nighttime hours following the CRTC's approval of an amendment to SCN's licence), relaunching it as City Saskatchewan in September of that year.
[21] Subsequently, in March, Rogers purchased CJNT-DT in Montreal from Channel Zero; as part of the agreement, CJNT began carrying Citytv's prime time programming in the interim, while a licence amendment it filed to convert the multicultural station into a full-time English-language outlet underwent review with the CRTC.
Quebecor would later voluntarily shut down CKXT on November 1, 2011, amid questioning by the CRTC on the company's usage of the station to simulcast Sun News Network.
[26] Sun News eventually ceased operations on February 13, 2015, citing persistently low viewership and the failure to obtain CRTC approval to require mandatory carriage of the channel on domestic pay television providers, and after failed attempts to sell the network to ZoomerMedia (owned by veteran Canadian television executive Moses Znaimer) and Leonard Asper.
