Sure, you’ve seen Vice Media trying to close the deal with a TV channel plenty of times, but let’s face it: In all the time you’ve known Vice, you’ve never actually seen the media conglomerate with a TV channel in any meaningful sense. But Vice insists it totally does have a TV channel. You’ve just never seen it because it lives in Canada.
Vice has partnered with Rogers Communication—which owns plausible-sounding things like “Sportsnet 360” and “Flare Magazine” that, you know what, I guess we can give Vice the benefit of the doubt that those are real things that exist, up in Canada somewhere—on a new, $100 million TV venture. Their new deal would give Vice a full-time TV channel based out of Toronto, where it will providing youth-oriented news and entertainment in a way that’s really, really, not imaginary.
Vice Media actually hails from Canada, where it started out as a small counterculture magazine in Montreal, only to become a New York-based media powerhouse encompassing a network of web sites, numerous books, a record label (whose artists include The Black Lips, Fucked Up, and The Raveonettes), documentary films, and an HBO show. As Rogers is Canada’s largest cable provider, this deal will make Vice one of North America’s biggest media players—because you know those Canadian conglomerates keep their corporate partners warm at night, if you know what Vice means. And most importantly, they really, totally do exist.