Movie Central (occasionally abbreviated as "MC", mostly in program guides) was a Canadian English language Category A premium cable and satellite television channel that was owned by Corus Entertainment.

Movie Central was carried by various Canadian cable, IPTV, and satellite television providers in Western Canada including Bell Satellite TV, Shaw Direct, Shaw Cable, Access Communications, Telus Optik TV, and Westman, among other providers.

Its programming was comparable to that of The Movie Network (TMN), a separately owned pay service which is marketed to Eastern Canada, in areas located east of the Ontario-Manitoba border.

The Movie Network, which previously held a similar regional monopoly in Eastern Canada, subsequently expanded into the West to become a national service.

Allarcom Pay Television, owned by Charles Allard, was initially granted the regional concession for Alberta.

[2] By January 1984, Superchannel had received approval to expand its service area to Saskatchewan (replacing Teletheatre, a province-wide pay-cable network that had been operating since the late 1970s), Manitoba, and what is now the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.

[4] By the spring of 1984, it became clear that the remaining pay service operators were continuing to post substantial monetary losses.

The Encore Avenue channels adopted a format of films from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, possibly due to the introduction of Turner Classic Movies in Canada.

On November 19, 2015, Corus announced that as a result of a strategic review, it decided to exit the pay TV business in order to concentrate on its national specialty channels, and would discontinue Movie Central and Encore Avenue on March 1, 2016.

[8][9] Depending on the service provider, Movie Central provided up to six multiplex channels – four 24-hour multiplex channels; one of which (HBO Canada) was also available on a two-hour delay, two of which were simulcast in both standard definition and high definition – as well as a subscription video-on-demand service (Movie Central On Demand).

The HBO Canada schedule was common to both services, with the exception of timeshifting for the Eastern (TMN) and Mountain (MC) time zones.

In any event, HBO's parent company Time Warner is not a shareholder, and only licenses the name, logo and programming to Corus and Bell.

Movie Central did not have a cross-provider TV Everywhere service for online and mobile streaming similar to HBO GO or TMN GO.

A selected time block on the channel called Metro, aired independent, short, festival, foreign, and subtitled films, documentaries and original programming.

Critics argued that this limited competition and consumer choice, while proponents said that there was very little in content or functionality that was not already offered by the existing services.

In July 2005, the CRTC, the Canadian federal broadcast regulator, announced that public hearings would begin on October 24 of that year on four applications for new national pay television licences from different groups.