President of Canada’s Bell Media says FAST news channel growing quickly
The president of one of Canada’s top media companies has explained how news is key to the company’s digital future.
Bell Media owns CTV News, the biggest English-speaking TV, radio or print newsbrand in Canada with a weekly reach of 28% by the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
It was also found to be the second-biggest online newsbrand with a weekly reach of 19%, behind public broadcaster CBC News on 23%, and it was the most-trusted newsbrand (63%) among a non-exhaustive list, just ahead of CBC News (62%).
Yet news is ultimately a small part of what Bell Media does. It also owns CTV, Canada’s most-watched TV network, other channels, out-of-home advertising network Astral, French-language network Noovo, radio and podcast app iHeartRadio Canada, and has partnerships with various product companies and facilities.
It is also focusing on growth at streaming service Crave, which has just announced a massive expansion increasing by 30% to 40,000 hours of entertainment, news, sports and children’s programming, and is launching a bundled subscription with Disney+ and Bell’s sports platform TSN.
Bell Media president Sean Cohan told Press Gazette that nonetheless news is “valuable” and “an important proof point” in the company’s digital transformation.
Bell Media’s CTV News on FAST channels
For example, CTV launched ten FAST [free ad-supported television] channels last year, including a CTV News specific strand with the best of its national and local programming which Cohan described as among the most popular.
“Every month the audience grows by 20% or something crazy like that,” he said, although he also stressed the FAST channels are still in a stage of experimentation.
FAST channels are similar to conventional TV channels, running a set schedule of programming, usually on a certain theme, with adverts – unlike streaming services through which consumers can choose what to watch and when. Bell Media’s FAST channels can be watched through platforms like LG Channels, Plex, The Roku Channel and Samsung TV Plus.
Cohan joked that it is “a little bit of Back to the Future, because that’s a linear channel, that’s just the same thing.”
He noted that in Canada FAST channels are “still pretty nascent” – behind the US where they are now “maturing”.
Cohan said of the growth of CTV News on FAST so far: “What you learn is that you have to experiment. There is an appetite in the demos that you aren’t getting at with pay, there still is an appetite for linear news.
“The audiences on FAST are younger at times and they are different. They’re learning that maybe news isn’t doomed after all. I say that with a little bit of snark because I’ve never said it’s doomed. But I do think… the demise of news has been greatly exaggerated. It’s just reimagined and it’s just a different play going to be in different places.”
Cohan added that major news providers “are spending a lot of time, a lot of money in generating, investigating and rigorously assembling the news for the day or for the hour, or for the minute, and we need to be increasingly agile in getting that out in all of the shop windows that people want their news – or might want their news and don’t know about it”.
Cohan, a former president of international and digital media at A+E Networks and chief growth officer and president of international and audience measurement firm Nielsen, moved to Toronto to lead Bell Media in 2023, described himself as “not a journalist by trade, but I’m a news junkie” who believes in the need to be informed.
Despite acknowledging the economic difficulties of news in today’s market, Cohan said producing news and local content is a “really valuable differentiator for companies like Bell Media while we’re competing with the global digital giants” like Netflix, Amazon and Disney which all dwarf Crave in terms of number of subscribers (more than 3.6 million at the end of 2024 versus 126 million globally for Disney+, the lowest of the three giants).
“I think it’s a big part of our story and it’s one that we actually, frankly, haven’t leaned into a whole lot when we’ve been talking publicly… You’ll hear us talk more and more, I think, over time about how proud we are of our news service, how important it is, and then also frankly how much work we still have to do to lean even more into providing news where the younger demos get their news.”
CTV’s 6pm news across all of its local stations in Canada still averages more than a million viewers in aggregate.
But Cohan discussed the “fierce” war for attention being fought across Bell Media’s news and entertainment content spaces.
“The one thing that we know is that despite our best efforts, 24 hours in a day is not getting expanded, right? You only have 24 hours in an audience’s day, and you’re fighting against everything…
“The good news, if we want to take a half full view, is that people are consuming as much or more video overall as they were yesterday, consumers are, they’re bounded only by sleep, and sleep is losing for better or worse, so that’s the good news, but you’re right that it’s a hyper competitive landscape. So how do you compete?”
‘If you can’t beat the platforms, join them’
Cohan noted that young audiences “recognise the CTV News moniker but they don’t recognise it from linear TV and they never will, or they probably won’t go there in the same numbers that they did years ago, I’m being diplomatic there.
“What they will do if we’re doing the right things, is they’ll find CTV News on FAST, on Youtube, on Tiktok and on our apps, on Crave in the near future, and on other apps.”
Cohan described it as a situation where “if you can’t beat them, join them” that makes it worth partnering with Youtube and Tiktok for both awareness and revenue.
“But it’s not quite that simple, it’s maybe a little bit too reductive. We compete for attention, but we also have to partner for attention,” he said.
“I think competing in the new world, or in 2025, 2026, is about partnering strategically while making sure that across the verticals of sports, entertainment and news, you’re delivering the best storytelling, the best content, and getting out and sharing that message with the consumers.”
Bell Media is owned by BCE, Canada’s biggest communications (internet and IT tech) company. The media division made up 13% or $3.2bn CAD (£1.7bn) of BCE’s $24.4bn (£13bn) turnover in 2024, and saw growth of 1% year on year put down to higher advertising revenue despite a fall in subscriptions.
Bell Media started the year with around 41-42% of its revenues coming from digital and Cohan said this should have risen to about 45-46% by the end of the year “so we’re creeping up towards that tipping point. Obviously you want to be at half, you want to be one day soon at a place where 70% or three quarters of your revenue is digital.”
Crave: Response to world of ‘fewer, bigger, better’ apps
The Crave streamer is “ground zero” for Bell Media’s digital transformation, Cohan said. The service has been profitable for “three or four years” and recently surpassed four million subscribers, having added one million in about 18 months since Cohan joined the company. The Canadian addressable market of households is about 16 million, Cohan said. His aim is to reach six million subscribers and they are “on or slightly ahead of schedule”.
The play, he said, is to “continue to think about delivering a tonne of value and compelling content and stories, whether that’s entertainment or news or kids”.
Later this year 10,000 more hours of content will be added to Crave, taking it to 40,000 in total and broadening the scope of its offering, while it will also get a more personalised experience and easier-to-use interface.
Cohan said: “I think the play there is a recognition that the world is moving to fewer, bigger, better in terms of apps or where it gets its entertainment, its sports, its news.”
He said he hoped Crave would be “the first stop” for entertainment and information in Canada and “hopefully a stop that people stay at for longer”.
“I think it’s a recognition that Crave is our gem, and probably one of our strongest assets in Bell Media so it maybe represents a little bit of a double down on Crave.”
‘Diversity and quality’ helping in tough ad market
Cohan also described a “pretty dramatic” growth in digital ad impressions across sports, entertainment and news on, in particular, Youtube, FAST and advertising on Crave. Q1 2025 was Bell Media’s fifth consecutive quarter of ad revenue growth.
He agreed that it is “not an easy time” for the global ad market due to uncertainty for both advertisers and consumers, but said Bell has benefited from Canada’s recent national election, its move to digital, and having the diversity of the digital out-of-home sector as part of the portfolio.
“It is a tough time out there for all advertisers. I just think we feel good with the diversity of platforms we’ve got, with the quality of the audience and the scale of the audience we’ve got, and with the progress we’ve made with initiatives that are helping us offset the challenges in the market.”
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