Shaw to buy two BC cablecos
On June 14 and 15 Shaw Communications Inc. announced it had entered into agreements to acquire Pemberton Cable, a Coast Mountain Communications property, and Saltspring Cablevision. In what is a fact of life in the cable distribution industry, the big get bigger and the small get acquired. "It’s the way of cable," says Peter Lyman, senior partner at Nordicity Group Ltd. "If you’ve got a small cable system you can’t afford all the infrastructure to go into telephony and into high-speed Internet access, so the way to monetize your investment is to sell to somebody who can. That’s the logic that would [resonate] with anybody who’s [looking at] getting out of the business."