Michael MacMillan, chief executive officer and co-founder of Blue Ant Media, at the company’s Toronto office on March 10.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Can Michael MacMillan make magic happen again? Tens of millions of dollars are staked on the answer being yes.
The Oscar-winning Canadian media luminary has performed that feat once before. In the 1990s, he built Alliance Atlantis atop a wave of media industry transformation that saw cable television supplant traditional broadcasters. That business, which spawned the still-popular CSI: Crime Scene Investigation franchise, sold for $2.3-billion in 2007 to CanWest Global Communications Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. GS-N
Now, having recently taken his latest venture public and with backing from famed Canadian financier Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. FFH-T, Mr. MacMillan is attempting to ride the streamer-centric media tsunami to a second multibillion-dollar crest.
His new company, Blue Ant Media Inc. BAMI-T, is amassing mountains of content to sell globally either in the rapidly expanding free, ad-supported streaming television, known as FAST, space – including apps such as Tubi – or to subscription streamers. While the strategy is markedly different from the one Mr. MacMillan pursued with Alliance Atlantis nearly three decades ago – which involved launching specialty channels in Canada such as the Life Network in 1995 and HGTV in 1997, and funding expensive scripted shows including CSI – he sees the profit-making opportunity as the same.
“Imagining how the media industry’s twists and turns were creating different opportunities today, that reminds me a bit of the opportunities I saw years ago,” Mr. MacMillan said in a recent interview.
“There was a wave of new technologies that changed what the players were doing in our industry and caused disruption and caused some harm to incumbents, but created opportunities for new players. Now we are in another time of pretty significant disruption created by technology.”
Blue Ant currently has a market capitalization of roughly $176-million.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
He isn’t the only one to notice the parallels. David McFadgen, managing director of institutional equity research for ATB Cormark Capital Markets, covers Blue Ant with a buy rating and a price target of $18.50 per share.
“In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, we saw a lot of viewership move to the specialty TV, cable TV universe, so the CNNs and Sportsnets of the world,” Mr. McFadgen said. “As viewership climbed, then the advertising dollars showed up. Sometimes it takes them a little while to show up, but eventually they show up because advertisers want eyeballs and I think that is what we are seeing right now with FAST, where viewing is really ramping.”
According to Nielsen data, streaming viewership only surpassed the combined viewership of broadcast and cable in the United States for the first time less than a year ago, in May, 2025. Streaming had hit a 44.8 per cent viewership share, compared to 44.2 per cent for broadcast and cable.
As recently as May, 2021, traditional TV still dominated American eyeballs, with streaming only accounting for 26 per cent of viewership.
“This reminds us of the time when specialty/cable channels eclipsed viewership of broadcast TV (CBC, CTV, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.) and then specialty/cable channels growth was very high, and valuations followed suit,” Mr. McFadgen wrote in a September, 2025, note to clients that initiated coverage of Blue Ant with a buy rating and a $17-per-share price target. “The best Canadian examples of this success were Radiomutuel, Astral Media and Alliance Atlantis – all acquired at high valuations after significant share price increases. Now we’re seeing the same phenomenon, but this time with Blue Ant at the forefront.”
Blue Ant currently has a market capitalization of roughly $176-million. Breaching the billion-dollar valuation threshold is an ambitious goal, but Mr. McFadgen – whose $18.50-per-share price target implies the stock will triple over the next 12 months – sees it as achievable.
Right now, Blue Ant stock trades at $6.30, which Mr. McFadgen said is roughly three times its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA. To reach Mr. McFadgen’s current price target, the stock will need to trade closer to seven times Blue Ant’s EBITDA.
“But even that I don’t think is a lot,” Mr. McFadgen said, adding that such rapid growth requires acquisitions.
That is exactly what Mr. MacMillan has been doing. In fact, pursuing a growth-by-acquisition strategy is a key reason he took Blue Ant public through a reverse takeover of Boat Rocker Media Inc. last year. Since then, the company has picked up two businesses – U.S. documentary streamer MagellanTV and Vancouver-based TV producer Thunderbird Entertainment Group Inc. – and Mr. MacMillan said Blue Ant has more takeover deals in the works.
“It is a really interesting time especially if you have a decent balance sheet to take advantage and to do acquisitions,” he said. “Catalogues and libraries and acquisitions and investments that would continue to build out our international business are top of mind.”
Focusing on low-budget, unscripted content that isn’t tied to a particular time or place – what the industry calls “evergreen” – is in many ways the exact opposite of the strategy Mr. MacMillan pursued with Alliance Atlantis. With Blue Ant, he is not counting on creating the next CSI.
“What we are not doing is producing or acquiring $20-million-per-episode one-hour shows in the scripted area,” Mr. MacMillan said.
Shareholders oppose Blue Ant offer for TV producer Thunderbird Entertainment
Instead, he points to Blue Ant’s Love Nature product, which the company acquired in 2012 when the channel was called Oasis and rebranded it in 2015. Love Nature titles include shows such as Dogs with Extraordinary Jobs, Uptown Otters and Wildlife ER, with the concept centring on shows that are easy to produce, require little if any script and are broadly appealing to all demographics.
Love Nature is currently available in more than 100 countries on multiple platforms and its annual revenue has grown from roughly $14-million in Blue Ant’s 2020 fiscal year to $37-million in 2024.
The idea is to have multiple products along the same lines as Love Nature, creating a more diversified income stream that doesn’t have to rely on the fickle whims of the viewing public. Part of the rationale behind the Thunderbird acquisition, for example, was picking up unscripted reality show-style content such as Highway Thru Hell.
“We are extremely proud of it, but it is not a water cooler phenomenon and it won’t be and that is okay,” Mr. MacMillan said of Love Nature. “It is a great brand and asset that travels extremely well, but it won’t be the show that is going to provide a billion dollars in value like CSI did.”
Blue Ant’s latest quarterly results, released on April 14, suggested the combined growth-by-acquisition and evergreen content expansion strategies are starting to pay off. Revenue in the three-month period that ended on Feb. 28 came in just shy of $70-million, representing an 82 per cent increase from the same time last year.
'Imagining how the media industry’s twists and turns were creating different opportunities today, that reminds me a bit of the opportunities I saw years ago,' Mr. MacMillan said.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
When maintaining the “decent balance sheet” he needs in order to keep making acquisitions, it helps to have a lead investor with some of the deepest pockets in the country. Fairfax, a massive, mostly insurance-focused holding company controlled by billionaire investor Mr. Watsa, has been an investor in Blue Ant since Mr. MacMillan founded it in 2011 and is currently its single largest shareholder with a roughly 18 per cent ownership stake, according to S&P Capital IQ.
Fairfax was also the controlling shareholder of Boat Rocker when it was acquired by Blue Ant. As part of that transaction, Fairfax offered Blue Ant a “value assurance payment” of $34.7-million if its newly acquired assets failed to hit certain income thresholds for the 2025 calendar year. The thresholds were not met and Mr. MacMillan was able to put that money directly into his war chest.
“It is neither a loan nor the issuance of shares, it is Fairfax contributing capital to us and it is not a repayable loan,” Mr. MacMillan said. “It is money in our hands.”
Of course, Fairfax has long been expecting big returns on its Blue Ant investment for nearly a decade. In his 2016 letter to Fairfax shareholders, Mr. Watsa detailed Mr. MacMillan’s success with Alliance Atlantis before making his expectations for a repeat extremely clear.
“We trust that Michael and his team will have similar success with Blue Ant!” Mr. Watsa wrote.
There is one “other really important similarity,” Mr. MacMillan said, between when he took his first company public in 1993 and Blue Ant’s market debut last year.
“At the very same time in both cases the Blue Jays were in the World Series,” he said. “Viewership is already shifting to streaming and advertising dollars will eventually as well. It might take some time but it will happen. In the meantime, I’m just hoping the Blue Jays get another shot at the World Series in less than 32 years.”