Blue Ant has a business called MediaPulse, which is our very fast-growing smart TV ad sales business. So those are the three comments I wanted to make about sort of the market context. Now let's dive into Blue Ant a little bit more. So there have been headwinds in the media industry for the past five years or so. Partly, that's been after the large streamers got into real content inflation, buying and licensing a vast amount of programming. They kind of sobered up a little bit and began to right-size or decrease their annual content spend over the past couple of years. Other media companies had undergone debt-fueled expansion funded by cheap debt, and now they've got poor balance sheets.
Ad volatility in the market, especially as some of the paid streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime added advertising inventory into the market in the past year and a half. These have all been different headwinds into the media industry. But it's also meant, though, for companies that have a strong balance sheet like Blue Ant, that have a diversified set of revenue streams like Blue Ant, and have an experienced management team like Blue Ant, it's a really interesting opportunity for us to acquire assets at very fair valuations and to turbocharge our growth in that way. It's also a great opportunity for a strong management team to see even organic growth opportunities within an industry that's been in flux. So we view the headwinds in the industry as a fundamental advantage for us. Next slide, please. So this slide is really about how Blue Ant makes money.
All of this comes from the idea of us producing or acquiring, but in any event, owning and controlling content. And with that content, we license it, so i.e., we rent it to third-party users around the world, or we sell subscriptions of our channels to viewers around the world, or we sell advertising to advertisers in Canada, the U.S., and around the world. So three sources of revenue: rental licensing, subscription fees, and advertising. And each of those is possible because we own the content and we can derive value from that content. Next slide, please. This slide really is just an example of what was on the previous slide. And the punchline is that we've got a couple of hundred customers around the world, and you recognize many of the names on this slide. Next slide, please. We have three reporting segments within Blue Ant.
The first one is global channels and streaming, and this is a number of channels, again, Canada, the U.S., and internationally. Some are pay-TV channels that also contain advertising, and some are free channels that are advertising only. Love Nature and MagellanTV are subscription channels with advertising, and all the rest are advertising only. So these channels, we operate them by producing or acquiring programming, putting the programming on the channel. We make money by selling subscriptions and selling advertising. We also run a smart TV ad sales business, MediaPulse, which I mentioned a moment ago. The next segment is production and distribution, and this is what it sounds like. We develop and produce or acquire original programming and sometimes existing programming. We produce programming that we own, and we also service-produce programming for other users sometimes.
And we acquire programming from third-party producers so that we can own it and exploit it around the world. We're constantly developing, producing, and acquiring new shows. That's what we do. Week in, week out, month in, month out. And we try to focus our production and distribution on genres of content that travel well, that have a long shelf life, that don't cost a crazy amount of money to produce. So these are categories and genres like nature and wildlife, kids, animation, lifestyle, reality, etc. What we're not doing is we're not in the business of making $15-$20 million per episode drama series for Apple TV or customers like that. Next slide, please. And our third reporting segment is Canadian media. And this consists of two things: seven Canadian pay-TV channels, two sources of revenue, subscription fees, and advertising, as well as 11 consumer shows.
Next slide, please. Now I'm going to give you two brief examples of our sort of business models at work. The first example, Love Nature, is of a channel, and the second example in a moment is of a program catalog, so Love Nature is a channel that we created, we invented. Each year, we commission or produce an original slate of programming, all 4K natural history programming, so it's all wildlife and natural history. This channel, we export and deliver to platforms all around the world. We're in about 100 countries. In many territories, it's a pay-TV channel, and we get subscription fees. In other channels, in other countries, rather, like in the U.S., it's a free streaming channel with advertising. In some markets, it's got a dual source of revenue. In other markets, it's a branded block, for example.
The reason that we're able to exploit this channel in different methods in different territories is because, the secret sauce, we own the content in it. The general theme you're going to hear in this presentation is that controlling content is how one maximizes the opportunities of making money with it. Next slide, please. Here's an example, not of a channel, but of a catalog. Indeed, this catalog is not a catalog that we produced, but one that we acquired a couple of years ago. Mike Holmes is a TV personality in the U.S. and Canada, sort of in the home repair genre. We acquired 275 hours of produced content that he'd made over the past decade or more. We make money from that catalog by renting it to various streamers and broadcasters around the world.
And also, we use it as prime content on our own Homeful free streaming channel in the U.S., Canada, and internationally. So pretty similar theme as the Love Nature idea. By owning and controlling content, we can maximize the methods by which we get paid for it, so maximizing our monetization opportunities. Now I'll hand it over to Robb Chase, our CFO, and he can introduce himself.
Thanks, Mike. And thanks, everyone, for attending. Just a quick introduction. I've been at Blue Ant since the beginning in 2011. I'm the CFO. In a prior life, I was the CEO of Famous Players theaters, which was part of Paramount, where, like Mike, we also made a decision to sell the company. I ran the auction, and we sold it for a considerable, healthy premium for our shareholders. This chart is our picture of our financial results from 2020 through to the 2025 fiscal periods. Strong performance and growth in key financial metrics through a time period that included both the pandemic and the industry headwinds that Mike described earlier. The bar charts on the right show the increasing international revenue diversification from being mostly in Canada in 2020 to 50% outside the country in 2025. And most of that new revenue is from the U.S. and the U.K.
Next slide. This is a picture summary of our share capitalization. Our largest shareholder is Fairfax Financial. They own roughly 23%. They were one of the five original founding shareholders of the company in 2011. The rest of our shareholding is widely held. There's no other shareholder above 10%. Like most Canadian broadcast and media companies, Blue Ant has a dual-class share structure. It allows us the advantage of owning Canadian channels, which both trigger tax credits and also give us access to Canadian tax credits for production and other supports like the Canadian Media Fund in our studios and channels business. Next slide, please. We firmly believe in having a strong balance sheet with modest leverage. It allows us to be opportunistic on both organic growth initiatives and M&A, as well as weathering the natural timing differences inherent in production and content deliveries.
On the left-hand side of this page, at our fiscal year end, we had CAD 54.4 million of cash ending August. That includes CAD 25.5 million of a cash injection at the RTO close. And the other two elements are two other inflows from the RTO, the first of which has already received a CAD 13.6 million monetization of a vendor take-back note that closed last week. And the second is a value assurance payment of up to CAD 34.7 million, which is predicated on the margin contribution of the three production companies that were acquired. That will be measured at the end of calendar 2025, and we expect those funds by the end of March 2026. All of these elements are part of the Fairfax RTO deal support. Next slide, please. So our growth strategies, we'll launch right into it.
Organically, most and many of the organic growth initiatives are in global channels and streaming. There's four things here. First, the launch of new global brands across multiple platforms. These are brands that mimic or have the attributes of Love Nature that Mike described earlier that can travel internationally around the globe. The second are digital opportunities. It's well developed in the U.S., but it's just beginning and more nascent internationally, and there's opportunities there for growth and expanding on platforms like YouTube, where we are present but have a large opportunity. The third is smart TV ad sales. We've recently added Paramount+ and Discovery+ in Canada, ways of adding inventory that we plan on continuing, and then finally, increasing our content production, doing more, producing more based on the commissioning power of our own channels as well as deep third-party relationships. Next slide, please.
As Mike mentioned, in the first four months of being public, we've closed one transaction, MagellanTV, and announced another, Thunderbird Entertainment. Both of these companies were looking for a strategic partner that could help them scale their businesses. We'll touch on more of the details in a few minutes in a moment, but it really validates our thesis of the big opportunity in the M&A area. Our focus is, as you see here in the chart, channels and streaming. MagellanTV is a great example of that. On the studio side, Thunderbird Entertainment is a great example of adding our production capacity. But there also, we're looking and actively searching for both library or catalog opportunities akin to the Mike Holmes example that Mike touched on a moment ago.
We're looking selectively in the Canadian media area, particularly at live event, new shows or things that expand our media sales offering, and then finally, in media-adjacent sectors like our MediaPulse Smart TV ad sales business, and we have a leadership team that's deeply experienced in transactions, both in structuring and in integrating them post-closing. Next slide, please. These are sort of our attributes that we're looking for. This is not a revolutionary framework by any means, but we are disciplined in assessing opportunities against our criteria, and they include building scale, having synergies, a strategic fit, so businesses that are complementary to what we're already invested in, and then finally, IP, either an immediate ownership of content rights or a path to owning or acquiring more content rights in our select genres. Next slide, please. Last week, we announced the Thunderbird acquisition.
It's a great company with a strong reputation and deep customer relationships in animated content, unscripted, scripted, and kids and family. On the strategic rationale, one of the big things is we expect to realize cost synergies of CAD 7 million in the first 12 months. A lot of that is duplicative public company costs and overlap in corporate shared service functions. We'll add meaningful scale and earnings and cash flow, and importantly, add to our public float. On IP, there's 1,100 hours of owned content, and we think we can create more opportunities for owned IP with our deeper distribution and rights business. And it's a great strategic fit. Next slide, please.
So the summary of the transaction, it's CAD 89 million, roughly, payable in cash and shares, up to CAD 40 million in cash and the balance in shares at the seller's option based on the exchange ratio agreed on November 25th, captured through a plan of arrangement. As I mentioned, we expect to realize those cost synergies of CAD 7 million in the first 12 months, making the deal highly accretive. There are voting support agreements with Thunderbird shareholders representing 37% in favor of the transaction. And the closing is expected in the first quarter of calendar 2026. We have to clear Competition Bureau, and Thunderbird will hold their shareholder vote. Next slide. MagellanTV, which we closed in October, is a U.S.-based group of channels in the history, engineering, science, nature, and crime genres. Great fit with the genres of choice for Blue Ant.
It's delivered on both free streaming platforms as well as an SVOD product. There is a particularly great fit and synergies. Much of the programming currently on the product is a revenue share model, and we plan to change that to content that we own outright. We've identified 1,500 hours of content that will significantly change the margin profile and help scale that business. Next slide, please. Part of our transaction experience is also realizing and harvesting value. One of the best examples of that is Omnia Media. Omnia Media was a music-focused YouTube multi-channel network, or MCN, that we modified to focus on gaming and scaled that business up. We sold it in 2020. The acquisition cost and development capital put into it was a total of CAD 33 million, and we realized aggregate proceeds of CAD 115 million on the completion of the sale.
That cash was deployed into other growth areas, repaying debt and returned to shareholders through a share buyback in which we reduced our share float by roughly one-third. Next slide. Mike, back to you.
Okay. Thanks, Rob. So we have a strong team, as you would imagine, at Blue Ant. This is a slide actually dealing with Alliance Atlantis, and this is my previous company. The company that we started for CAD 300,000, raised CAD 700 million of shareholders' equity and delivered CAD 2.3 billion of equity value back to the shareholders when we sold it. One thing to point out here is that at Alliance Atlantis, as with Blue Ant, we had a dual-class share structure. So I had the controlling authority at Alliance Atlantis. And I was the one who, in late 2006, early 2007, came into our board and said, "I think it's the right time to sell Alliance Atlantis." And I think it surprised some people that the controlling shareholder wasn't going to hang on forever, but instead, I wanted to maximize value.
We put it up for auction and sold it, as I said, to CanWest and Goldman Sachs. Next slide, please. Great leadership team. There's the executive team. You can peruse that later on, and also, we have a very strong board of directors pictured here, so next slide, please. In summary, Blue Ant is a profitable, growing company. We're technology agnostic and thus able to move and shift as everything shifts over to digital delivery. We've got a very strong balance sheet, and Robb outlined that and how we're going to use. We are using that balance sheet to take advantage of the M&A opportunities that exist because of some of the changes in the industry. We've got strong revenue streams, diverse revenue streams, which causes solid cash generation from operations, and finally, as we talked about before, leadership dedicated to creating and harvesting shareholder value.
That's our presentation, and we'd be delighted to try to answer your questions.
Perfect. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Robb. Again, to our audience, if you have a question, please use the Q&A text box within the webinar portal. We do have a number of questions in the queue, so we'll just get going. First question for you. Are there any revenue concentration risks, such as top streamers or top distribution partners, that you need to be careful of?
I guess we want to be careful not to have that. But we don't have, and Robb, correct me or add more if you wish. I think that we don't have any customer, certainly with more than 10%, but I don't know that we've got anybody with more than 5% of our revenues currently. So no, we don't. And in fact, we like to have a diversified risk profile. We want to be in advertising and subscription. We want to be diversified by territory also. And even within that, we want to have a wide range of customers, and I think we do a pretty good job at that.
Super. Here's an interesting question. Can you explain the company's name, Blue Ant?
It's based on a science fiction writer who, in his sort of future-looking name for the modern media company of the future, would be Blue Ant. So back in the old days of Alliance Atlantis, we produced a lot of science fiction. We don't do any science fiction at Blue Ant, but it's a nod and a wink to our Alliance Atlantis sci-fi heritage.
Okay. Thank you. Can you speak to the magnitude of the Magellan acquisition? Is it relatively significant?
The purchase price for Magellan was $12 million U.S. So it's sizable, but it's not gigantic by any means in the overall scope of Blue Ant. And it's payable mostly upfront, which we did, and then two further installments in one year and two years from now. So that's the size of it. And it's a highly strategic investment because it helps grow out our global channels and streaming business and adds another subscription product into our portfolio.
Thank you. How do you think AI will impact content generation and other parts of your business?
Well, it will. For sure, it will. And exactly what form that takes is early. And it's interesting. The folks at Thunderbird have been doing a lot of work in non-generative AI, and they're building out new products by themselves and directly with their customers, we understand. We see in the short run for us that AI should bring some operating efficiencies, some efficiencies in the production process in easy ways, like foreign language versioning and so on. But I think the question was more profound than that. I think that it's going to bring on more, probably lower-level, cheaper content onto the market. But I'm a firm believer in human creativity.
I prefer, my colleagues prefer to think that AI is just another tool that we can use in the production process, not unlike what computer-generated animation has already brought to the production process over the past 15 years. You look at most motion pictures today, any Marvel feature film today, and look at all the AI or computer-generated content there compared to a decade ago, and it's quite amazing. I think it'll be a very useful tool in the toolkit.
Okay. Thank you. Can you explain the significance of your genre niche? Is it only non-fiction? And what's the lifespan of a show being relevant?
What was the last part of the question, please?
The lifespan of a show being relevant.
Sure. So the main attributes are that we want to be in genres that travel well. So ideally, not only North American, that they can be used on different platforms, are ideally family-friendly, and therefore possibly usable in territories where that's kind of an essential fact. Having a price that makes sense is, well, is simply sensible. So these are categories like wildlife and natural history, mystery, history, lifestyle. Also, kids and animation fits into that. And having a good shelf life is relevant because the marketplace in media is very slivered. It's sliced into many pieces these days. And to extract the full value from a program, you really want to be able to use it and reuse it in the same geography or the same territory more than once in sequence.
So having something that is not of interest in a year from now is hard to make those sequential licensing deals.
Okay. Thank you. Thunderbird has done a fair amount of scripted material and has been increasing their content in recent years. You mentioned that Blue Ant is trying to stay away from that type of content, which tends to be more expensive. Assuming the merger goes through, do you plan to change any of your philosophies at all in creating scripted content?
No, we won't change our philosophy. For complete clarity, that's a great question, and thank you for it. For complete clarity, what I said in my remarks is that we don't make those $15 or $20 million per episode big drama series for Apple TV+ or something like that. We are already slightly in the scripted business. We have shows like Davey & Jonesie's Locker. We do some animation already. We like the fact that Thunderbird is in the young adult scripted area. That's a very, very different approach to scripted than the big Hollywood $15 million per hour episodic dramas. We don't want to change our strategy at all. The scripted work that Thunderbird is doing is completely consistent and therefore attractive to us. Good question.
Thank you. We've got quite a few questions, obviously, around the Thunderbird acquisition. So I'll try to get through most of them in this little segment. Regarding the Thunderbird acquisition and the CAD 7 million in synergies that were announced, do you feel that additional savings are to be made? Is the goal of CAD 7 million? And I guess, can you focus on where you think those synergies come from?
Sure. We know that we've identified at least $7 million of synergies thus far. And where we found them thus far is almost entirely, but not quite, in duplicated public company costs and in duplicated shared service costs. And those are the two categories far and away that make up most of that $7 million. And that was a kind of, and this is a kind of cost savings that we couldn't accomplish when we acquired the Boat Rocker assets through that RTO because we were able to cut costs, but then we took on new costs of being public. In this case, Thunderbird and Blue Ant both have the full suite of public company costs.
Okay. Thank you. Again, sticking on that, the acquisition, Thunderbird gave guidance on their recent earnings. How does this acquisition potentially impact that guidance?
The commentary that Thunderbird put out on the same day that we announced our proposed acquisition. We take their comments on their earnings for this current fiscal to be clear. But they were careful to point out, and I would also point out right now, that the CAD 7 million of synergy cost savings that we're talking about is in addition to the commentary that they gave on their standalone results for this fiscal. So the synergies are in addition to that.
Okay. Thank you. So I know that content is king, and this is a bit conceptual, but is the industry perhaps getting to a point, or if not, could get to a point of too much content?
Yeah. I mean, I certainly think that the big subscription streamers, Netflix, Prime Video, Paramount+, came to that conclusion in a way in the heady arms race of trying to attract streaming subscribers, which is really probably 2017 to 2022. They were spending too much, in my opinion, and they were also trying to acquire worldwide rights for most of what they were acquiring, generally speaking, in perpetuity, which didn't make any business sense because none of them were operating in every nook and cranny of the world. They've come to their senses wisely since then. They've cut back their program spending, and now, as often as not, they're not acquiring every right, every usage everywhere in the world, but they're often joint venturing with other players.
That when they began to cut back a bit more on their spending, that caused some disruption, especially in the section of the market that was producing the high-priced dramas that was driving much of that spending. Is there too much content? There is a lot of content. You want to make sure that your content is priced properly. I'll be now going to repeat myself, but ideally, it has a long shelf life and can travel widely, is easily versionable, is usable in most places in the world. That's how you're going to extract value from it.
Okay. Thank you. As Mike Holmes makes new shows, are they yours, or did you just buy this catalog of prior shows?
We bought his catalog, and we didn't buy anything else, everything else that he's going to do in the future. So we bought his catalog. What we also did buy, however, was we commissioned him and his children to make some new original Holmes family programming for us, which he has done or is doing. Maybe he's finished. I'm not quite positive. So we did buy some new stuff, but we did not commit to buy everything else that he did in the future. We just bought his library, mainly.
Thank you. When you decided to sell your former business, what were the main reasons behind the decision? Why did you think it was a good time to re-enter the marketplace given all the industry uncertainty?
It was December 2006 when I decided it was time to sell. We put out the call for bids. We took the winning bid in January 2007, and we closed it in August 2007. The reasons were, I thought that our company was in an excellent spot. I thought that technology, after the massive run-up of dot-com in 2000, 2001, the technology changes had kind of paused. I don't mean stopped, but it was kind of quieting, pausing a bit. The equity capital markets were insane, and the public debt markets were doubly insane. Money was being lent out at six, seven times multiples. I mean, it was crazy. Our company was in good spot. We weren't missing anybody on our senior leadership team. Most of our competitors seemed distracted.
And I was also really worried not only about the over-exuberance of the stock market, but also that I was worried about geopolitical tensions. And the other thing was, when you start a company with CAD 300 and now you've got a company doing CAD 1.2 billion in revenue per year with 1,200 full-time employees, the responsibility for all of that was realizing that, I didn't know that if we'd ever get another time where we could extract more value. So that was why. And in hindsight, closing it in August 2007 was very fortunate. Why did I come back? I came back partly because I missed the cut and thrust of business. And also, I got myself an iPad in 2010, and I was playing with it. And I was watching things. This is 2010, so 15 years ago.
And I thought to myself, "Wow, this is going to be like a TV screen, like a portable TV screen. I could have all my TV viewing on this." That's a crazy thought. Oh, well, that's possible. I got to get back in and do this again. I won't be technology tied to an old technology called the cable subscription. I could use my experience from before, get into a disrupted industry if the theory that your iPad or your cell phone is going to be your portable TV set, wow, what an amazing opportunity. And plus, I missed the cut and thrust of business.
Thank you. What is the most monetizable content that is in your current library?
The most monetizable? It's all pretty monetizable. I suppose I'll give you one example. Our Wildlife and Natural History Library sells well, and we sell it as the Love Nature channel, which I already described. In some territories, we repackage it up as a free streaming channel called Nature Time. In some territories where the channel doesn't exist, or even where it does exist, we'll relicense some of the same programming, the same Wildlife and Natural History shows to other streamers or broadcasters in the territory, like different uses sequentially. Like somebody else might use some programs at first, then it comes on our channel, then we use it as Nature Time, then something else. The Love Nature Library, we use in quite a wide range of ways. It does travel well, and it's easy to language version. It's family-friendly.
It's sort of not really educational, but it's certainly family-friendly. So it may sort of tick every box, actually, of what is sellable.
Okay. Thank you. Can you talk about what are your operational integration milestones for Thunderbird post-acquisition across production, IP, ownership, global distribution? I guess anything that you can comment on?
Sure. I guess number one will be the back office or shared service functions of finance and IT and legal and so on. It's also a significant source of cost savings, so that will be probably the first and, in a way, the easiest. Secondly, will be to combine our distribution teams, program distribution teams. We have a larger one, but have one presence out at the international TV sales markets, marketplaces, and conventions. That's another thing. We want to have our distribution team be much more active in working with Atomic and Great Pacific's creative development team to help them create more programming that they own, and we hope to do a bit less service work and a bit more proprietary program creation where we can own it and we can be the distributor internationally.
But to do that, one has to immediately begin very close conversations and industry knowledge swapping between our distribution team who has the data on what the international marketplace wants, along with the creative producers who are developing things to hopefully fill that bill. So that's another opportunity. And well, those are probably the main ones in the first 12 months.
I think, Mike, if I could just add, in integration, we have an animation studio Jam Filled. I think there's a lot of excitement about the fact there's little overlap in their customer base. We virtually have a completely different customer profile than Atomic Cartoons. And I think both of those companies are excited to see how they can help each other grow and develop. So that'll be one of our integration opportunities on top of those things Mike was speaking to.
Thank you. Do you believe that Thunderbird's acquisition will allow you to substantially improve your EBITDA growth and margins in production and distribution? And what would be your target net debt to EBITDA over the next two to three years?
I think it will. I don't know that the Thunderbird acquisition will change our production margins per se. To the extent that we're able to convert some service projects to proprietary, then in that case, it probably will. It will certainly reduce the percentage of our total costs that are in our fixed cost overhead. So it'll probably improve our overall margins, but not necessarily the contribution margins from the individual productions. But that's okay. Robb, do you want to take the question about debt to EBITDA?
Yeah. I mean, we don't really have a target. I mean, we've had leverage generally below one times. We also think about what, when we're thinking about debt, we're also thinking about funding our content investment. So what's the cash spend relative to amort and the net content investment spend? We sometimes think about what's the coverage on that as well as debt because that's really the core of our business. And there, we might because that would significantly reduce sort of the available cash. We've been spending CAD 15 million-CAD 20 million of net content investment spend as we built Love Nature and built the streaming business and some of these other activities.
If you add that in, it might be a slightly higher number, but that's kind of how we think about it as having a modest level of debt and lots of available cash to fund our net investment and content spend.
Thank you. How do you view the use of your cash, I guess, post-Thunderbird acquisition in the following ways? Number one, do you have a current share buyback program and would you continue to use it? How do you balance your cash versus M&A, working capital, etc.?
Rob?
We've announced a share buyback program. As we came out of blackout with the filing of our Q4 year-end results, that program has actually gone live and is being initiated kind of as we speak. We do think that, with the kind of capital available to us right now, it's not a big deployment of capital, but doing the modest amount based on our current trading volumes is something we think is a smart thing to do, smart use of capital. In terms of, sorry, Glenn, what was the second part of the question?
I guess just on a go-forward basis, your general philosophy of.
Of how to deploy cash. It's a real balancing act because we want to be able to jump on opportunities when they come, and I think what we've said to ourselves is if there was an opportunity like MagellanTV that was an amazing fit but had far more scale to it. MagellanTV was a relatively modest acquisition. That's the kind of thing we could see ourselves stretching for in the short term, and then using the cash that comes from operating activities to pay back down that debt to get back to kind of the leverage that we were talking about. So it really is we want to be able to be opportunistic, and we would jump, I think, if there was a great strategic fit that would really fundamentally scale our company.
Thank you. Was MagellanTV profitable when you bought them? And if not, how do you plan to grow that division into profits?
It was profitable when we bought them, and we believe it'll become more profitable as part of Blue Ant. Two things that we're doing. One is that because they started six or seven years ago with not too much capital, they acquired their programming substantially through revenue share arrangements, whereby they shared a fraction of their revenue with their program suppliers. And that's a smart way to build it, but obviously, your cost of goods sold increases in the same ratio as your revenue, so you can't improve your margins, so we are going to be shifting out a lot of that rev share programming and replacing it with, as Rob mentioned, we had 1,500 hours of programming that would work perfectly for Magellan that we already own, so as that gets put onto Magellan, that should materially improve the margins that Magellan has.
As well, we have a channel sales team that gets our existing channels out into the world outside of North America. We believe we can get more carriage for the Magellan channels in Europe and Asia, which they weren't able to get. That should also be the second thing to improve margins and profit.
Okay. Thank you. Do you have an M&A strategy outside of Canada and the U.S.?
We do, but our main focus is Canada and the U.S. to have activity on the ground. We also have small operations in Singapore and Sydney and London as well. We're not really strategically assuming we're going to have significant physical operations outside of North America or outside of maybe the U.K. or Europe. Things get harder to manage the further away you are. We are, however, looking at other forms of M&A like catalog acquisition or program library acquisitions without regard so much for what geography they currently reside in. So if we're going to be doing M&A outside of North America and Europe, it would probably be in the content catalog department.
Okay. Thank you. I guess I got a couple of questions around this genre or this theme, so I'll just sort of combine it. Thunderbird and Boat Rocker both struggled to create shareholder value post-COVID despite good quality content and production teams. Can you just talk about what you think you could do differently or what you could do as a collective business to bring additional value outside of just these cost synergies?
Well, I would say a greater involvement of our distribution team. Relatively, our distribution activity is a larger part of our studios business than the distribution business is or was for either Thunderbird or Boat Rocker. And indeed, the production businesses from Boat Rocker that we acquired, Insight, Jam Filled, and Proper, really weren't very much of the distribution activity of Boat Rocker. Their distribution activity was more in the scripted area. So that's probably one of the most important things I believe that are advantages that we can bring to the table. Another thing is there's the positivity of size in this or scale, rather, in this industry. And I think that the profile of a combined Blue Ant Boat Rocker and Thunderbird in the marketplace will create its own generation of opportunities. So size does matter in this industry.
So that's an advantage that I think a new advantage that we will have as a larger triply merged company.
Thank you. Do you do any business with Curiosity Stream as you seem similar and also cross-license content? They have developed an AI licensing strategy where they license content similar to yours to LLMs for model training. Is that something you're pursuing?
Yes, we are pursuing the model training. We don't do cross-licensing with them, but they've been a customer of ours, and we know them. They're in an interesting niche. We know them. We both have significant operations in Washington, D.C., so they're sort of neighbors there. Yeah, they're an interesting business, but we don't do cross-licensing. They did commission some programs from us several years ago, but not currently, I don't believe.
Okay. I may have misunderstood, but you mentioned that the dual-class share allowed you to be eligible for government financing. Can you elaborate on that and the structure?
Sure. So there's two parts to it. One is that as a producer, as a Canadian producer, we have access to Canadian and provincial tax credits. And also, we're applicable to funding from the Canada Media Fund or other similar provincial agencies. So that's the first thing that one needs to be Canadian-controlled to access. The second one, and a slightly more complicated one, is in order to own Canadian broadcast licenses as issued by the CRTC, which is our equivalent to the FCC, one has to be Canadian-controlled. And there, the definition and the tests for Canadian control are much tighter and pickier, you might say, than for the first category for the tax credits and Canada Media Fund. So what we do at Blue Ant is we have got a dual-class share structure.
Every share has a vote, but then I have a handful of shares with a very large number of votes and also a very large number of shares with de minimis voting power. And when you add up the whole thing, it means that we absolutely qualify for all those support programs and that we qualify to own the Canadian channels that we own. And importantly, because it works well, it means there is no other restriction on how many shares non-Canadians can own. And we like having non-Canadian shareholders. We want that. And it's interesting. At Alliance Atlantis, we had a similar dual-class share structure. And it allowed us to have probably half our shareholders were American. And we listed on NASDAQ with the same structure. And that was good too.
We like having non-Canadian shareholders, and we know that this dual-class share structure enables that without any worry.
Perfect. I think you just answered another question in there, so we'll skip that. Can you give us an example of what an advertiser would pay you versus an add-on service like Netflix?
What an advertiser would pay us?
Versus an add-on service like a Netflix.
I'm not sure if I understand.
I'm just reading it, so I'm not quite sure either.
Yeah.
Okay. We'll move on, and we'll come back to that.
Okay.
It looks like the success of CSI was a major reason for Alliance's success and high valuation. How important do you think it is for Blue Ant to create, produce one or more hit-owned IP? Do you think anything in the Blue Ant Thunderbird umbrella has that kind of potential?
Well, potential, yes, but you can't promise to have a hit. So we'll see. But I will say it's interesting. Of the CAD 2.3 billion of equity value we sold Alliance Atlantis for, plus the buyer paid CAD 300 million to buy the debt. So the CAD 2.6 billion, actually, that was paid for the business, about CAD 800 million was for CSI, and about 1.3 or 4 million was for our distribution channel system. And then the balance was for our movie distribution business and part of the library. But the biggest single asset, the biggest single piece of value in that Alliance, and I know the value that was allocated because the various pieces got pulled apart and went off to different ultimate owners, the biggest single value was in the channel/distribution business that we built up.
Anyway, in terms of, do we have the chance to have a big hit like CSI or whatever, one hopes so.
Okay. I'm just doing a time check. It looks like we're at the top of the hour. We do have a few questions in the queue, but I think most of these have been answered in one way or another. So I'm just going to ask you, Michael, for some closing remarks, and then we'll end the presentation.
Okay. Well, first of all, thank you, everybody, for joining the call, and thank you, Glenn, for organizing it. As you can tell from listening to Rob and me, we are super enthusiastic about our prospects. We're delighted that we did go public on this reverse takeover structure in August. We are certain that our strategy of not only organic growth, but taking advantage of dislocation in the media industry is the right one. And we're heartened by the progress we've made in the initial 14 weeks with the acquisition of MagellanTV and the announcement of the intention to acquire Thunderbird. So we are pleased with the direction, and we'd be happy to have further conversations with anybody on this call who would like to, as appropriate.
Super. Thank you very much, Michael. Thank you very much, Rob. And thank you to our audience. This concludes this presentation.