The founder and chief executive officer of Rogers Communications, Inc., Ted Rogers has become Canada’s undisputed new-media mogul. A tireless worker, over the last 35 years Rogers has ceaselessly expanded his business undertakings by plunging head-long into each new communication technology. He has compared his corporate machinations to the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and Time-Warner, maintaining that only by building Canadian companies of comparable size and diversity can Canadians be assured of a distinctive voice at the forefront of the electronic highway.

Established in 1967, Rogers Communications has grown into one of Canada’s largest media conglomerates. Rogers Communications is the largest cable television business in Canada, with more than 30 percent of all Canadian cable subscribers. As a broadcaster and television content provider, Rogers Communications owns more than 40 radio stations, CFMT in Toronto (a multicultural television station), the cable channel Sportsnet, and the Canadian Home Shopping Channel. It also owns a chain of video stores. In telecommunications, Rogers Communications held a major stake in Unitel Communications, a long-distance telephone company, from 1989 to 1995, and has been in the wireless telephone business since 1985. As of 2002, Rogers Communications owned 51 percent of Rogers AT&T Wireless, a Canada-wide cellular phone service. As a result of its 1994 takeover of Maclean-Hunter Ltd., Rogers Communications became the majority shareholder of the Toronto Sun Publishing Corporation, publisher of newspapers across Canada, and is also the owner of dozens of periodicals in Canada, Britain, the United States, and Europe. In 1993, Rogers Communications generated revenues of $1.34 billion; the addition of the assets from Maclean-Hunter bring the annual revenues of Rogers Communications to more than double that figure.

Ted Rogers’s interest in broadcasting continues a family tradition. His father, Edward Samuel Rogers, Sr., was the first amateur radio operator in Canada to transmit successfully a signal across the Atlantic. In 1925, he invented the radio tube that made it possible to build “battery-less” alternating current receiving sets, and in the same decade he founded Rogers Majestic Corporation to build them. Until then, neither radio receivers nor transmitters could utilize existing household wiring or power lines, and the batteries that powered radio receivers were cumbersome, highly corrosive, and required frequent changing. Rogers’s radio greatly increased the popularity of broadcasting. The elder Rogers also established a commercial radio station, CFRB (with the call letters signifying Canada’s First Radio Batteryless), in Toronto, which grew to command Canada’s largest listening audience. In 1935, Rogers Sr. was granted the first Canadian license to broadcast experimental television. He died eight years later at the age of 38, when Ted Rogers was five. After Rogers Sr.’s death, the Rogers family lost control of CFRB.

In 1960, while still a student at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Ted Rogers bought all the shares in CHFI-FM, a small, 940-watt Toronto radio station that pioneered the use of frequency modulation (FM) at a time when only 5 percent of Toronto households had FM receivers. By 1965, Rogers was in the cable TV business. In 1979 and 1980, he bought out two competitors, Canadian Cablesystems and Premier Cablevision (both were larger than his own operation), and, by 1980, Rogers Communications had taken over UA-Columbia Cablevision in the United States, to become for a time the world’s largest cable operator, with more than 1 million subscribers.

Rogers has since sold his stake in U.S. cable operations to concentrate on the Canadian market. His forays into long-distance and cellular telephone service, his ownership of cable services such as the Home Shopping Network and specialty channels such as Sportsnet, and the acquisition of Maclean-Hunter’s publishing interests, with more than 60 magazine and trade periodicals, make Rogers a key player in virtually all of Canada’s media markets.

Although the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission has generally given its assent to Rogers’s corporate maneuvers, there are many who believe that the commission has neither the regulatory tools nor the will to monitor or control adequately the activities of Rogers Communications and other large cable operators, especially with regard to pricing and open network access. While cable rates rose an average of 80 percent between 1983 and 1993, Rogers Communications was busy adding to its corporate empire and upgrading its technical infrastructure.

As some cable operators tremble at the prospect of competition from direct-to-home satellites and telephone companies, Ted Rogers has ensured that Rogers Communications is well positioned for life after the era of local cable monopolies. Taking his cue from corporate strategists south of the border, Rogers has added a sports property to his holding with his purchase of the Toronto Blue Jays, and his wireless venture now accounts for more operating revenue than his cable assets. From humble beginnings, Rogers has built a company that seems destined to travel in the fast lane.