Shaw was founded in 1966 by
JR Shaw as
Capital Cable Television Company, Ltd. in
Edmonton, Alberta. It was originally a subsidiary of
Shawcor, JR's father's firm, but the business was split from Shawcor in the 1970s. The company changed its name to Shaw Cablesystems Ltd. (after founder and chairman JR Shaw) and went public on the
TSX in 1983. The company grew during the 1980s and 1990s through acquisitions of firms including
Classicomm in the Toronto area,
Access Communications in Nova Scotia,
Fundy Cable in New Brunswick,
Trillium Cable in Ontario, Telecable in
Saskatchewan, Greater Winnipeg Cablevision (serving areas east of the Red River), and
Videon Cablesystems of
Winnipeg (serving areas west of the Red River), which, back in 1998, had itself previously acquired
Vidéotron's assets in Alberta. However, two swaps, in 1994 and 2001, with
Rogers Cable have resulted in its assets being restricted to
Western Canada and a few areas of
Northern Ontario. In 1999, Shaw spun out its media properties into a second publicly traded company,
Corus Entertainment. In 2001 the Moffat family sold
Videon Cablesystems to Shaw. Prior to 2003, Shaw owned cable systems in the United States previously owned by
Moffat Communications, serving six communities in
Florida (Eastern
Pasco County,
Clermont,
Palm Coast,
Ormond Beach,
West Palm Beach and
Doral), and the
Houston,
Texas suburbs of
Kingwood,
Lake Conroe and
Lake Livingston. In February 2003, the Florida systems would be sold to
Time Warner Cable (with the West Palm Beach and Doral systems later sold to
Comcast, and the other systems spun off to
Bright House Networks), while the Texas systems were sold to Cequel III, as part of its then-Cebridge Connections subsidiary (now
Suddenlink Communications). In 2008, Shaw entered the
AWS spectrum auction with the intention of possibly becoming a wireless phone provider. The auction ended July 2008, giving Shaw Communications enough spectrum to build a wireless network in its home provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and
Ontario. This spectrum ultimately went unused and was sold to
Rogers Communications in January 2013. The purchase was approved by the CRTC on October 22, 2009. The acquisition was Shaw's first cable property east of
Sault Ste. Marie since the 2001 swaps with Rogers and
Cogeco. Shaw's re-entry into Southern Ontario would be short-lived, as its Hamilton system would be resold to Rogers in January 2013 as part of a deal which also saw unused wireless spectrum sold to the company, and saw Rogers sell its stake in specialty channel
TVtropolis.
Return to broadcasting On April 30, 2009, Shaw announced a deal to acquire three television stations —
CHWI-TV in
Windsor, Ontario,
CKNX-TV in
Wingham, Ontario and
CKX-TV in
Brandon, Manitoba — from
CTVglobemedia. CTV had indicated that it would shut down the stations, all of which were incurring extensive financial losses, later in the year if a buyer could not be found, and had placed them on the market at a price of just $1 each. However, it was reported on June 30, 2009, that Shaw had backed out of the deal and was declining to complete the purchase. CHWI-TV would remain on the air as is; CKNX-TV would become a repeater of
London station
CFPL-TV in September 2009, while CKX-TV would close down entirely in October 2009. In February 2010, Shaw announced an agreement with the financially troubled
Canwest, whereby Shaw would buy an 80% voting interest, and 20% equity interest, in the restructured entity of Canwest, pending approvals from the CRTC and others. Three months later, following negotiations with rival bidders, the company said it would purchase the entirety of Canwest's broadcasting assets, including the interests in the
CW Media subsidiary partially held by
Goldman Sachs Alternatives. Canwest's newspapers were not part of the Shaw deal and were sold separately to
Postmedia Network. The acquisition was completed on October 27, 2010, after CRTC approval for the sale was announced on October 22, forming the
Shaw Media division.
2012–2023 In June 2012, Shaw underwent a corporate re-branding developed by the Vancouver-based agency Rethink, introducing an updated logo and slogan ("You won't miss a thing"), along with a new promotional campaign featuring the animated characters Bit and Bud—robots who lived in a representation of Shaw's "pipe". The campaign drew comparisons to
Bell Canada's former beaver characters of
Frank and Gordon, which were overseen by Shaw's then-new chief marketing officer Jim Little while he was at Bell. In April 2013, Shaw Business Solutions took over
Enmax's Envision subsidiary, which had built a fibre-optic network throughout
Calgary. The acquisition was completed for $225 million. In 2014, Shaw partnered with
Rogers Communications to launch
Shomi, a subscription video on demand service. In February 2015, Shaw announced that they would close operations for service call centres in Edmonton, Calgary and Kelowna, and consolidate operations in Victoria, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Montreal. 1,600 of Shaw's 14,000 employees were affected by the consolidation and cuts. The company offered affected employees the option to relocate to its centralized offices, apply for a new job at their location, or leave the company with a severance package for former employees unable to relocate. In 2013, Shaw attempted to begin developing an
IPTV-based platform for its television services. However, after experiencing issues developing the platform, Shaw took a $55 million write-down in June 2015, and announced that it was licensing
Comcast's cloud-based
Xfinity X1 architecture. In January 2016, Shaw launched its
mobile television app FreeRange TV, based on X1 infrastructure, which allows Shaw subscribers to stream selected TV channels and on-demand content. On January 11, 2017, Shaw launched its X1-based cable service, "BlueSky", in Calgary. Shaw later launched Comcast's Xfinity xFi whole-home Wi-Fi platform under the "BlueCurve" branding.
Freedom Mobile, divestment of media assets On December 16, 2015, Shaw announced its proposed acquisition of independent wireless provider
Wind Mobile from its investors in a deal worth approximately $1.6 billion. The transaction closed on March 1, 2016. Under Shaw, the company was renamed Freedom Mobile in November 2016, coinciding with the launch of its
4G LTE network. The acquisition of Wind was funded by a reorganization in April 2016, which saw the
Shaw Media unit transferred to Corus Entertainment, in exchange for $1.85 billion in cash and 71,364,853 class B
non-voting shares of Corus. The sale did not include Shaw's 50% stake in the
Shomi streaming service and
CJBN-TV Kenora; Shomi was shut down in November 2016 and CJBN-TV Kenora was shut down in January 2017.
Acquisition by Rogers On March 15, 2021, Rogers announced that it would acquire Shaw for $26 billion, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval. This proposed acquisition was criticized by public lobby groups like
OpenMedia, as a move that would reduce national competition in the Canadian wireless communication market by removing one of the four major competitors from the market. For the sale to go ahead, the CRTC ordered Rogers to divest
Freedom Mobile. It was reported on June 17, 2022 that
Quebecor, a media and telecommunications company based in Quebec, intended to acquire the company for 2.85 billion. The CRTC approved the merger on March 24, 2022. On May 9, 2022, the
Competition Bureau announced an application to the Competition Tribunal to block the transaction due to its effects on the wireless market. On August 1, 2022, Rogers announced that the merger was expected to be completed at the end of the year; however, on October 25, 2022, it was announced that the Rogers-Shaw merger had been rejected as proposed. On January 24, 2023, Canada's Federal Court of Appeal allowed the merger to proceed. The merger was approved by the federal government on March 31, 2023, and completed on April 3. Immediately following the transaction, Shaw Communications was
amalgamated into Rogers Communications, and no longer exists as a separate entity, though some subsidiaries such as Shaw Cablesystems may still exist as distinct legal entities. == Other activities ==