Consumers are the winners in the federal broadcast regulator's decision to nix BCE Inc.'s controversial $3.4-billion takeover of specialty TV provider Astral Media, analysts said Thursday.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission turned down one of the biggest takeovers ever submitted, rejecting a deal that it said would not benefit Canadians and one analysts suspected would drive up cable bills.
Consumers won't face any increased prices that may have been associated with Bell buying Astral, said telecom analyst Troy Crandall. "Market power was an issue," said Crandall of MacDougall, MacDougall & MacTier in Montreal.
Crandall said if the deal had gone through, consumers could have faced higher monthly cable bills if Bell had pushed up the price of selling programs to other TV providers. That cost, in turn, likely would have been passed on by other providers to consumers, he said.
He noted that Bell increased the price it charged to other cable providers to carry the TSN sports specialty channel once Bell bought the rest of the CTV assets it didn't own in 2010.
Analyst Iain Grant said consumers should be "breathing a sight of relief."
Bell's plan was to use Astral's content across TVs, computers, tablets and smartphones and sell it to its own customers and to its competitors. But Grant said Bell's strategy to put content on the four screens shouldn't be affected.
Bell and Astral had argued to the CRTC in September that Canada needs its own online TV and movie service to compete with Netflix and the merger of the two companies would allow that.
But the company can take the $3.4 billion it was going to spend on acquiring Astral to buy and create content, said Grant, managing director of the technology firm SeaBoard Group.
Grant also said Bell can still go ahead with a made-in-Canada Netflix-type offering to provide online programming to consumers.
