Mark Bishop & Matt Hornburg on the Year Ahead for Blue Ant Media

2025 was a transformative year for the folks at Blue Ant Media, which transitioned from a private media firm to a publicly traded company. It also acquired Insight Productions, Proper Television, MagellanTV and Thunderbird Entertainment, significantly increasing its creative footprint and distribution catalog and further asserting its commitment to providing premium factual content.

“Our expanded scale has diversified our content offering and set up a collective strength across our business units that will allow us to move into new genres, new platforms and new audiences while staying rooted in creating and finding audiences for great stories,” co-presidents Mark Bishop and Matt Hornburg say.

While global commissioning has slowed down, “the appetite for premium, high-quality content hasn’t gone away,” they note. “It has just become more selective.”

As such, the company’s transformations last year have allowed it to keep up with buyers’ selectivity by diversifying its offering. “We specialize in high-end factual and investigative history, like our self-commissioned series Buried Evidence and History Unsolved: The Investigation Files,” they say, as well as true crime and mystery. Their newly expanded portfolio also now covers factual entertainment, lifestyle programming and docuseries such as Amazing Race Canada, Extracted and The Great Canadian Baking Show.

The distribution arm of the company, Blue Ant Rights, has been finding success with timely documentaries, including Taylor, about global superstar Taylor Swift, and Matthew Perry: A Hollywood Tragedy, about the Friends star’s life and addiction. The latter has sold to platforms in over 50 territories worldwide.

Across both their studios and rights businesses, Bishop and Hornburg have found a continued appetite for long-running series, spin-offs and format adaptations. “However, each of these, in particular entertainment formats, do best when they offer fresh, local perspectives that audiences love,” they note. “We’ve found success in both adapting premium formats like Old Enough!, Canada’s Drag Race and Amazing Race Canada, as well as creating and exporting original formats such as Blue Ant’s original sand sculpture competition series, Race Against the Tide.”

Despite the fact that long-running series, spin-offs and formats have proven popular, Blue Ant Media has power through its production, distribution and channels businesses that allows it to partner for original IP and bring fresh ideas to the market. “We leverage opportunities across our production, distribution and global channels businesses to create customized co-finance plans to bring a series to market,” Bishop and Hornburg say. “We have the ability to partner on original IP while leveraging creative financing to fill budget gaps.”

The transformation the company underwent last year allows Bishop and Hornburg to feel positive about the year ahead. “We’re optimistic that our growth as a company will allow us to invest in projects we believe in and take bigger risks,” they say. “We know few studios have the breadth of capabilities we do under one roof.”

Importantly, “we’ll need to continue embracing change” and being adaptable, they add. “The way audiences consume content is constantly evolving, and we’ll need to continue meeting them where they are.”