Fight Media Inc.
The League – Fantasy Sports TV (Category B)
Approved: January 9, 2013

Fight Media Inc., which currently owns The Fight Network, is owned by Leonard Asper. Asper used to be the CEO of Canwest. Today, he stakes his future success on mixed martial arts, and fantasy leagues. At this point, The Fight Network relies most heavily on MMA, boxing, and the Live Audio Wrestling brand.

To be honest, The League isn’t a bad idea for a channel. It will likely work better on the Internet than as interactive television, yet Fight Media wants to get The League on air in North America, by summer 2013. There’s already a “fantasy pool” on The Fight Network’s website, where players choose who will win MMA fights.

The League won’t be able to devote more than ten percent of its schedule to televised sports. It’s hard to say what The League will be, when it debuts. The point is, Asper hasn’t left the Canadian television scene, though he’ll likely never get back what he lost.

Continue reading Industry Update – CRTC News: The League, Quest, Paul Girouard, theScore, Must-Carry Channels →

City New Year’s Bash 2013 was notable for one thing beyond the start of a new year – it was the first time Citytv called itself City, on a national basis. The name truncation was floated for a few months beforehand on Citytv stations, and on voiceovers that call the program service “City Television.”

The rebrand doesn’t amount to much – online viewing habits are the official stated reason for the rebrand, even though people are still watching television on the Internet. The true attraction is City’s soon-to-be-newest owned-and-operated station, City Montreal. On February 4, 2013, City makes its formal debut as a national program service.

Continue reading Industry Update – The New Adventures of Old City →

The world of Canadian television websites is a small one and it lost one of its loudest, funniest voices yesterday. Adam Wright, who ran the TV Done Wright website and live-tweeted his #AdamRage about a wide variety of shows, died yesterday.

He rarely wrote about Canadian shows specifically (though his interviews with Rookie Blue‘s Tassie Cameron and Gregory Smith are among those linked to from this site) , but he clearly loved television as a medium even as he raged about it, and his website treated the Canadian series it did cover on the same playing field as American shows. Adam Rage was equal opportunity.

I didn’t know him well but I knew him as a passionate writer who was well on his way to trying to break into television writing on the other side of the screen. He leaves us too young, too full of potential, and shock and sadness are streaming on Twitter from his friends and family as well as TV industry folks on both sides of the border.

I didn’t know him well enough to write a proper tribute, but one of his online friends posted one:

• In Memoriam: Adam Wright by Les Chappell
  Yesterday, I learned that my friend and colleague Adam Wright, founder of TVDoneWright.com and a contributor to The Huffington Post, passed away. While he’d been in poor health for the last few months, in and out of the hospital from various bouts of pneumonia, his death still comes as a complete shock and a tragic loss for all of us who knew him. He was a critic of an impeccable wit and brutal honesty, a solid and ambitious writer, and a seemingly unstoppable force of energy powered by Tim Hortons coffee and righteous indignation. It’s very hard to have to say goodbye. Read more.