Ian Greenberg, the media mogul who, alongside his brothers, helped build Astral Media into a Canadian radio and television powerhouse, has died at the age of 79.
Media giant Bell Canada Enterprise (BCE), of which Mr. Greenberg was a member of the board of directors, announced that he had died on Monday. The cause of death has not been released.
“Canada has lost a business visionary and media legend, and we at Bell have lost a wise and kind colleague and friend,” BCE Chairman Gordon Nixon said in a statement.
Mr. Greenberg was born in Montreal to an Ashkenazi Jewish family of 10, including his brothers Harold, Harvey and Sidney.
Money was often lacking in the household, and when her mother Ann passed away suddenly in 1961, the brothers were given the responsibility of working together to support the family.
Two of Mr. Greenberg’s older brothers had spent their teenage years working in a camera store, prompting them to take out a $ 15,000 loan from a close relative and invest it in a film processing called Angreen Photo, named after their mother.
By opening counters in Miracle Mart department stores, the brothers expanded the business over the next decade. Small acquisitions extended their investments to the processing of films for theaters and in particular obtained the exclusive rights to souvenir photos of Expo 67.
The business continued to grow and Astral Communications went public in 1971.
Within a few years, Astral ventured into the film and television production industry, notably with The apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, in 1974, with actor Richard Dreyfuss, and City on fire, a disaster film shot in Montreal in 1978.
These activities have yielded mixed results at best, the salacious comedy Porky’s, from 1982, being one of their rare productions to have generated a profit. It established itself as the highest grossing Canadian film at the North American box office for years before My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Wedding of the year in the French version) does not steal the crown from him in 2002.
The Greenberg brothers, ready to recognize when an investment didn’t work, quickly left the film business in the 1980s, focusing instead on the growth of Astral Photo stores and the burgeoning high-end cable television market. boom.
As the decade wore on, they assembled a list of valuable pay-TV assets, including English and French movie channels, First Choice (later renamed The Movie Network) and Premiere Choix (more later called Super Ecran) and Family Channel (the Family Channel).
When his older brother Harold fell ill in 1995, Ian became the CEO of Astral. He quickly shifted the company’s focus from photographic and video assets to purchasing radio stations, an area in which he saw a bright future.
Astral Media continued to grow to become the largest private broadcaster in the country, a status reinforced by the acquisition of Standard Broadcasting from the Slaight family in 2007.
On television, Mr. Greenberg used his negotiating skills to strike deals that others had failed to make.
One of his big victories was convincing the executives of the American network HBO to develop their relationship beyond licensed programming and to give Astral the right to launch HBO Canada, a brand that others had hoped they could. launch for years.
When Astral was acquired by BCE in 2013 for $ 3.38 billion, Ian Greenberg had led the company to at least 66 consecutive quarters of profitable growth, an incredible feat in the volatile media industry.
After the BCE purchase, Mr. Greenberg assumed a director role on the board of the company.