The license was originally held by a partnership called “Adventure United” uniting Labatt breweries and a number of smaller Canadian investors with Discovery Networks International (DNI), the American parent corporation of Discovery, which exercised its option to purchase 20 percent of the enterprise. Majority ownership ultimately passed to a media consortium called NetStar. Then, in early 1999, Canada’s largest private broadcaster, CTV, purchased 80 percent of NetStar. A year later, CTV itself was taken over by Bell Globemedia, the media subsidiary of giant BCE Inc., amid a wave of takeovers in Canada that brought Discovery under the umbrella of the country’s largest media conglomerate.

The advent of the digital era in Canada in the 1990s and the subsequent proliferation of services licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission presented DNI as its sundry partners with opportunities to expand and diversify the Discovery line. As a result, DNI also holds shares in Discovery Civilization and Animal Planet (also in conjunction with Bell Globemedia), Discovery Health (in partnership with Alliance Atlantis), and Discovery Kids (with Corus Entertainment). Many of these newer channels are available only in digital mode, and their potential and actual audiences are relatively small. Discovery Canada is the undisputed ratings champion within the Canadian branch of the extended family.

The founding president of the Discovery Channel was Trina McQueen. Lured away from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) after helping to launch the all-news channel Newsworld, McQueen is a leading television executive and a pioneering woman broadcaster in Canada. Her surprise departure from CBC represented something of a coup for Discovery. Reflecting on the early years of Discovery Canada, McQueen took pride in helping to establish popular domestic programming. She believed that Discovery’s winning formula was based on being “cool” and therefore attractive to cable subscribers (and, not insignificantly, to advertisers.) She boasted that the service had been able to maintain credibility with the scientific community even as it cultivated and entertained a diverse audience.

Many other conventional and specialty channels provide at least some space for content similar in kind to the programs offered by Discovery. Writing in Marketing, Muriel Draaisma noted that McQueen has emphasized that Discovery is not an “educational or instructional” service. She prefers to describe Discovery’s mandate in terms such as “curiosity,” “drama,” and “exploration.” Discovery Canada is also differentiated by theme weeks in which different aspects of a particular topic are in scope on successive weekday evenings.

Discovery has been among the industry leaders since its inception and is well positioned in terms of both average hours of viewing by adults and reach (its ratings are the highest among the batch of seven services that debuted in 1994.) The channel takes pains to report that viewer surveys point to impressive levels of viewer satisfaction.

A typical weekly rotation for Discovery includes a good deal of content originally with the American channel and other foreign producers, especially in the peak hours of prime time. However, the original condition of license (successfully renewed in 2001) obliges Discovery to invest 45 percent of its annual revenues in domestic content. The result has been the production of a number of acclaimed series that have appeared in syndication on other services at home and abroad. Discovery must also present at least 60 percent domestic content overall (50 percent in the prime evening hours). Short documentary films, a staple for which Canadians are often said to have particular fondness, occupy much of the schedule.

The flagship show on Discovery is @discovery.ca Airing nightly on the prime 7 P.M. slot, it is billed y the channel as the “world’s first and only daily science and nature news magazine.” It is one of the service’s most popular programs. According to a profile in the Ryerson Journalism Review by Rebecca Davey, in 1997 approximately 1.5 million viewers tuned into @discovery.ca at least once during the week, and, surprisingly, one-third of the audience is composed of women over the age of 18. In a reverse of the customary south-to-north flow of content, the Canadian show was picked up by Discovery Science in the United States.

The series is produced and presented by well-known science popularizer Jay Ingram, an award-winning radio host, television personality, print journalist, and former university educator. He joined Discovery prior to the service’s launch and helped design the show. His presence infuses the evening showcase with eclectic and witty perspectives on topical science stories. On any given night, the segments range across live remote interviews with astronauts in space or scientists in their labs, quizzes for both viewers and professionals, scientific demonstrations, and mini documentaries. The pace is fast, and the banner between Ingram and his on-air partners is bright. One of the features is an interactive segment called “You Asked For It,” in which viewers can make special feature requests or pose questions of experts.

Discovery’s programming is complemented by an ambitious website. The site was a first for Canadian television. Launched simultaneously with the channel in 1994 with the prosaic address of www.discovery.ca, the site was rechristened EXN (Explorer Network) in 1996. Users are able to access a wide variety of information on the site, including archived video and text material along with entries in “Jay’s Journal,” a sampling of Ingram’s typically engaging investigations of scientific curiosities.