Starz Restructures Canadian Business From Joint Venture With Bell

Starz is restructuring its operations in Canada from a joint venture with Canadian media giant Bell Media to a content licensing deal with the company.

“Today, we are announcing a structural change to our Canadian operation,” Starz president and CEO Jeffrety Hirsch said Thursday during the company’s latest quarterly earnings call. “We are moving from a joint venture model to a stable, consistent content licensing agreement with our partner Bell Canada. Under this new simplified structure, the Starz-branded service will continue to be available in Canada and Starz will generate international licensing revenue, while Bell will assume full operational responsibility in the territory. This approach is consistent with our strategy of owning our content and creating incremental licensing revenue without the need to operate international services directly.”

Hirsch says this deal will “be modestly accretive to Adjusted OIBDA and free cash flow in calendar 2026” and, along with other moves, “will assist us on our path to reaching 20% margins exiting calendar 2028.” 

This change in the relationship with Bell comes on the heels of Starz facing a recent “carriage dispute in Canada that resulted in the removal of the Starz-branded linear channel from a distributor’s programming packages.”

Starz says it ended the third quarter, which ran July-September, with 12.3 million U.S. OTT subscribers — an increase of 110,000 customers. Overall U.S. subscribers stood at 17.5 million for Starz, a drop of 130,000.

For Q3, Wall Street forecast a loss of earnings per share (EPS) of $1.81 on $321.4 million in revenue for Starz, according to analyst consensus data provided by LSEG. Starz reported a loss per share of $3.15 on $321 million in revenue.

(Pictured above: Starz’s “Outlander: Blood of My Blood.”)

More to come…