A dispute that resulted in Quebecor‘s withdrawal of its Sun News television channel from Bell Canada‘s satellite TV system has been resolved.
Quebecor’s TVA Group said that its four specialty channels – including Sun News and TVA Sports – will be available to Bell subscribers by Dec. 15. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“It was all about negotiating a fair commercial arrangement for the channel and we’ve been able to do so as part of this broader deal,” Bell said in a statement on Tuesday.
Bell also said it’s expanding its sports offering in Quebec with the addition of the 24-hour French-language digital sports network RDS2, including on mobile devices, starting on Wednesday. That’s in addition to Bell’s RDS and English-language TSN and TSN2 on the Quebecor’s Videotron cable service.
“With this new agreement, all TVA Group channels, including TVA Sports and Sun News, will be available to Bell customers,” TVA Group president and CEO Pierre Dion said in a news release.
“From our perspective, the agreement represents a major stepping stone for our speciality channels, as well as a powerful incentive to continue offering ever more innovative and original television to our viewers,” Dion said.
The TVA Group is part of Quebecor, which competes with BCE on several fronts.
Besides Bell Canada, which competes for telephone, wireless and Internet customers against Quebecor’s Videotron, BCE is majority owner of CTV, which has numerous specialty TV channels as well as its television network.
There have also been concerns that cable and telecom companies that owned TV stations would try to keep their content exclusively for themselves or charge prohibitively expensive fees to license content.
The CRTC has blocked media companies from offering television programs exclusively to their mobile or Internet subscribers in new rules for cable and telecom operators that also own TV networks.
