Starz is restructuring its Canadian operations from a joint venture with Canadian media giant Bell Media to a content licensing agreement with the company.
“Today, we are announcing structural changes to our Canadian operations,” Starz President and CEO Geoffretty Hirsch said Thursday during the company’s latest quarterly earnings call. “We are moving from a joint venture model to a stable and consistent content licensing agreement with our partner Bell Canada. Under this new simplified structure, Starz-branded services will continue to be available in Canada and Starz will generate international licensing revenue, while Bell will have full operational responsibility for the territory. This approach is consistent with our strategy to own our content and generate incremental licensing revenue without the need to directly operate international services.”
As a result of this change, starting next quarter, Starz will no longer report Canadian subscribers.
Starz said it ended the third quarter from July to September with 12.3 million U.S. OTT subscribers, an increase of 110,000 customers. Starz had 17.5 million total U.S. subscribers, a decrease of 130,000. Total subscribers in North America, including Canada, were 19.2 million, an increase of 120,000.
Hirsch said the deal, which comes six months after Starz spun off from Lionsgate and became an independent company, “will be modestly accretive to calendar 2026 adjusted OIBDA and free cash flow.”
Starz’s CEO said production has already begun on the company’s first in-house series, “Fightland,” and teased a deal with Bell Media as well as a co-commissioning partner that “will help us on our path to a 20% profit margin by the end of 2028.”
This change in its relationship with Bell comes after Starz recently “faced a shipping dispute in Canada that resulted in the removal of Starz-branded linear channels from the distributor’s programming package.”
For the third quarter, Wall Street expects Starz to report an earnings per share (EPS) loss of $1.86 on revenue of $321 million, according to analyst consensus data provided by FactSet. Starz reported a loss of $3.15 per share on revenue of $321 million.
In announcing these results, Starz reaffirmed its outlook to generate approximately $200 million in adjusted OIBDA by year-end.
(Pictured above: Starz’s “Outlander: Blood of My Blood”)
