Look Communications

» see look.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Look TV started in August 1997 out of Etobicoke, Ontario, selling digital television that arrived through the air. The dish on the roof was not pointed at a satellite. It was aimed at a transmitter tower, using MMDS in the 2.5 gigahertz band, and the CRTC licensed the company as a broadcasting distribution undertaking the same way it licensed cable. Southern Ontario got the service in 1997. Quebec and the eastern end of Ontario followed a year later.

In 1999 Look TV merged with Internet Direct, an internet provider with customers spread from British Columbia to Quebec, and the combined company became Look Communications on a sixty-forty split in Look's favor. It traded in Toronto under LOK and LOK.A. At its best it had something near sixty thousand television subscribers and a slogan, Chez Look c'est simple!

A Canadian company selling over-the-air television on frequencies the Canadian regulator had licensed to it is about as geographically fixed as a product gets. I have never lived in a country where this one was purchasable, and the part of it that travels is not the television. What travels is what happened to the spectrum underneath it.

~ the record ~

~ ninety megahertz ~

Look held roughly ninety megahertz of capacity at 2.5 gigahertz, exclusively, along with a license for mobile video service. No other company in Canada had that combination. Whatever the television business did or failed to do, those frequencies sat on the balance sheet getting more valuable every year that mobile data grew.

~ filed twice ~

Look filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001 and filed again in 2002. Unique Broadband Systems began buying in during 2002 and held fifty-one percent by the end of 2003, which turned Look into a UBS subsidiary and moved its head office from Oakville to UBS's building in Milton.

Profitability never came back. The company lost millions a year with no version of the business that closed the gap, and on 1 December 2008 it announced it was selling what it had.

~ where the subscribers went ~

On 14 May 2009 the Ontario Superior Court of Justice approved the sale to Inukshuk Wireless Partnership, the joint venture Bell and Rogers ran between them, for eighty million dollars in cash covering the spectrum and the mobile broadcast license. The subscribers went separately. On 15 November 2009 the television customers were transitioned to Bell and the internet side went to Durham.Net, trading as Telnet Communications. UBS put it plainly in its own filing: as of that date, Look was no longer serving any subscribers.

The address look.ca still resolves in 2026. The page behind it is a webmail login for Telnet Communications, offered in English and French, serving the customers Telnet inherited in 2009. The company's other address, lookcommunications.com, is parked with a domain broker asking for an offer.

~ the shell that became onenergy ~

With no customers and no staff, the listed company stayed alive to finish liquidating. On 26 March 2013 it announced it would acquire every outstanding share of Sunwave Gas & Power. That deal closed on 9 July, and three days later the company renamed itself ONEnergy Inc., a natural gas retailer in Toronto. The television company had been switched off since November 2009, and the only thing still breathing was the stock listing it had once used to raise money.

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