Galaxie - History

History

Galaxie launched on September 10, 1997 under the ownership of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Because of service duplication, in 2002, Galaxie and Max Trax (a similar television service owned by Corus Entertainment at the time) agreed to provide a joint 40-channel audio distribution service to satellite and digital cable television providers called Galaxie Max Trax. The package consisted of 20 Galaxie and 20 Max Trax channels.

On October 1, 2009 the Max Trax brand was discontinued, as its owners, Stingray Digital, (who purchased Max Trax from Corus in February 2009) and the CBC merged the two services together under the Galaxie brand. Stingray Digital, who had been operating as the exclusive sales and development agent for Galaxie since late 2007, officially took over as managing partner in the service upon completion of merger.

According to Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) records, Stingray purchased Galaxie from the CBC in May 2011.

On November 18, 2011, Stingray announced it had expanded the number of Galaxie channels available to be offered to distributors to 100. On January 10, 2012, Shaw Cable was the first distributor in Canada to launch 15 of those additional channels, the majority of which were focused on various genres of multicultural and multilingual music. The full slate of new channels were rolled out to consumers when SaskTel became the first distributor to carry all 100 channels in May 2012.