Haliburton Broadcasting Group

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Haliburton Broadcasting Group is a Canadian group of FM radio stations, concentrated in smaller markets in Central and Northern Ontario.

1 Outline
2 Strategy and competition
3 Haliburton Stations
- 3.1 Moose FM
- 3.2 CHYC
4 External link

[edit] Outline

The company is named for the Haliburton region in Central Ontario, where majority owner and president Christopher Grossman, a longtime radio sales manager, trainer and executive, is also a hotelier. Their first station, CFBG Bracebridge, is based not far from the region.

HBG expanded greatly into Northern Ontario in 1999 by acquiring several stations from the Pelmorex Radio Network. (In 2004, they would acquire CKNR in Elliot Lake, a station which had also once been part of Pelmorex but was sold to North Channel Broadcasting in 1996.)

The company owns nine English stations, all branded Moose FM. They are generally formatted with adult contemporary or hot adult contemporary music; Moose FM Timmins was a country music station before moving to classic rock. The company also operates two French stations, branded as CHYC (pronounced like the French word chic), over four transmitters.

Haliburton's head office is in Toronto, Ontario. Privately-owned Canadian radio giant Standard Broadcasting owns a significant minority interest in the group; Grossman is also an executive at Standard.

[edit] Strategy and competition

Haliburton's strategy has been based on the conversion of former AM radio stations to FM, adoption of generally more contemporary-oriented music formats, modest staffing levels, and economies of scale through shared voice tracking, production and advertising sales across the regional group.

Haliburton has encountered some competitive difficulty with its English stations that were not the only commercial stations in their immediate home markets.

CHNO in Sudbury was an AM oldies station when Haliburton acquired it from Pelmorex; a stipulation in the CRTC's approval of the transaction allowed it to move to FM. In 2000, it relaunched at 103.9 as top 40 station Z103. After a short time, it was sold in 2001 to the larger Newcap Broadcasting for significantly more than it had been acquired for. The CRTC, wary of potential "license trafficking," accepted the sale on the grounds that Haliburton had been losing money with CHNO, and would reinvest the proceeds into its contemporaneous purchase of CKLP in Parry Sound. Under Newcap's ownership, the station soon cut its news department and entered a controversial variant of a local marketing agreement to contract advertising sales and commercial production to the trio of Rogers Communications radio stations in Sudbury.

CHMT in Timmins launched in 2001 as an adult contemporary station as Mix 93, but soon faltered under competition from CKGB, formerly an AM country station which adopted the EZ Rock adult contemporary brand and moved to FM shortly after CHMT launched. CHMT flipped to country about a year later, and eventually relented as had CHNO, abandoning its own sales staff and sharing sales with the two Rogers Communications stations in Timmins.

On January 31, 2005, the CRTC decided, in renewing the licenses of the Sudbury stations (and other stations in Thunder Bay that had also been under an LMA), to make their licenses conditional on the winding-up of those agreements. It was not immediately clear how this might affect the agreement in Timmins.

On March 17, 2005, the CRTC published notice of an application Haliburton filed in 2004 to launch an FM country station in North Bay, Ontario. [1] It was approved on August 11, 2005. [2]

On April 7, 2005, they published notice of an application also filed in 2004 to launch an FM "Adult Contemporary Rock" station in Haliburton itself. [3] This license was also subsequently granted.