Mid-Canada Communications
 |
|
| Private (subsidiary of Northern Cable/CUC Broadcasting) | |
| Industry | Media |
| Founded | 1980 |
| Defunct | 1990 |
| Headquarters | Sudbury, Ontario |
|
Key people
|
George Lund |
| Products | television, radio |
Mid-Canada Communications was a Canadian media company, which operated from 1980 to 1990. The company, a division of Northern Cable, had television and radio holdings in Northeastern Ontario.
Mid-Canada Television, or MCTV, was created in 1980 when Cambrian Broadcasting, which owned the CTV affiliates in Sudbury, North Bay and Timmins merged with J. Conrad Lavigne's CBC affiliates in the same cities.
This twinstick structure was permitted by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission because both companies were on the brink of bankruptcy due to their aggressive competition for limited advertising dollars in small markets. Notably, the companies' holdings included two parallel microwave transmission systems, both of which were among the largest such systems in the world at the time, and which were technically redundant since one system can in fact carry multiple channels.
The deal represented the first time that the CRTC had ever approved direct ownership of a radio or television broadcast outlet by a cable distribution company, which is now commonplace in Canada but was explicitly forbidden by CRTC policy prior to the MCTV approval.
In its decision, however, the CRTC explicitly communicated the expectation that this would exist only as a temporary arrangement, to end as soon as the CBC could afford to directly acquire MCTV's CBC affiliates. That "temporary" deal, however, would last 22 years. Mid-Canada Communications did offer ownership of its newly-redundant second microwave network to the CBC as an interim step toward the establishment of a CBC Television production facility in the region; the CBC, however, expressed interest in keeping the negotiations open but declined to immediately purchase the system.
In response to concentration of media ownership concerns, the merged company divested itself of its predecessor companies' radio holdings CKSO and CIGM-FM in Sudbury, although it retained ownership of a couple of smaller-market radio stations and would later reacquire other radio stations in the region (see Mid-Canada Radio below.)
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Wikipedia