About RDS Info

RDS Info

Overview

RDS Info is a Canadian French-language specialty television channel devoted entirely to sports news, broadcasting 24 hours a day from Montreal, Quebec. It is a discretionary service — originally licensed in the Category A class of protected specialty channels — carried on digital cable, satellite and IPTV platforms across the country. It is the news hub of the RDS family, the French-language counterpart to TSN in the Bell Media sports portfolio. Where the main RDS network is built around live events — above all Montreal Canadiens hockey — RDS Info runs a continuous news service: a rotating wheel of sports scores, highlights and news reports, anchored by the flagship bulletin Sports 30, with a results-and-headlines ticker displayed across the bottom of the screen during most programming. The channel is owned by CTV Specialty Television Inc., the Bell Media (80 percent) and ESPN (20 percent) partnership, and its licence is held by Le Réseau des sports (RDS) inc. Its sister channels are RDS, RDS2, the TSN regional feeds and Noovo.

History

RDS Info began as Réseau Info-Sports, universally shortened to RIS. The channel launched on October 21, 2004, making its official debut that evening at 7 p.m., as a digital specialty service dedicated to French-language sports information. It was a natural extension of RDS itself, which had been on air since September 1, 1989 as the French-language sister of TSN, and it arrived as part of the mid-2000s expansion of digital specialty television in Canada. In December 2004, within weeks of launch, RIS joined BBM's portable people meter panel alongside RDS, an early step in measuring its audience. The channel operated under detailed conditions of licence typical of its era: it was required to consist essentially of sports news updated every 15 minutes, with strict caps on how much of its schedule could be drawn from long-form documentary, informal education, drama and comedy, and music-video categories, and limits on the live sporting events it could show. Its conditions were consolidated in the CRTC's group-based licence renewals for Bell Media in Broadcasting Decision 2011-444 in July 2011. The new channel quickly took on a second role: before the launch of RDS2 in October 2011, RIS served as the overflow outlet for the main RDS network, carrying live events that could not be accommodated on RDS itself, including National Hockey League regular-season and playoff games and Monday Night Football.

On January 23, 2012, RIS launched a high-definition feed and rebranded as RDS Info, aligning its name directly with the parent network. The channel's regulatory framework was modernized a few years later. In Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2016-21, issued January 20, 2016, the CRTC approved Bell Media's application, made on behalf of Le Réseau des sports (RDS) inc., to delete most of the channel's prescriptive nature-of-service conditions of licence — requirements written for its launch era that had obliged it to update sports news every 15 minutes, to interrupt live events with highlight inserts, and to display results and news on part of the screen at all times. The decision followed the Commission's elimination of genre exclusivity in its 2015 Let's Talk TV policy. In their place, the CRTC added a single condition capping live professional sports at no more than 10 percent of the programming broadcast in each broadcast month, while denying Bell's request to remove the condition requiring a share of Canadian programming from independent production companies. That condition dated from the licensing of the new digital Category 1 services in 2000, and the Commission reasoned that, because Category A services such as RDS Info would retain mandatory distribution until their next licence renewal, the independent-production requirement should be examined at that renewal rather than removed in the meantime. Bell's current regulatory description of the service, filed at the time, is a national French-language discretionary service primarily featuring sports news, updates and other sports-related programming.

Programming and Content

The core of RDS Info is Sports 30, the RDS network's flagship sports news bulletin. The program airs live every day, with editions at 5:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m., and a late-evening run from 10:00 p.m. into the overnight hours; the early-morning edition is a compact 15 minutes, while the weekday 6:00 p.m. edition runs a full hour (30 minutes on weekends). Listings also bill the morning edition as Sports 30 (Matin), part of the country's long tradition of breakfast-time sports bulletins. Between live editions, Sports 30 is looped to feed the channel's rotating 30-minute news wheel, a format comparable to ESPNews in the United States, and the on-screen ticker carries scores and headlines through most of the schedule. Bell Media's current channel description also lists Sports 30 Midi and Entre 2 matCHs among its original programs. Evenings bring variety to the wheel: from Monday to Thursday the channel schedules documentary series showcasing notable events in sports history, drawn from original RDS productions as well as NFL, ESPN and HBO documentaries, and on Fridays at 7:00 p.m. the Soirées Classiques strand invites viewers to revisit memorable sporting moments and classic episodes. The channel continues to act as a tertiary outlet for RDS programming when multiple events conflict on the main network and RDS2, and published listings for the channel in 2026 show blocks of Sports 30, L'Antichambre — the RDS panel show — and Classiques across its day.

Audience and Reach

RDS Info is distributed nationally as a discretionary service, with its audience concentrated in francophone Canada, above all Quebec. Distributors describe it in their current channel guides as the most comprehensive 24-hour French-language sports news network — Videotron's business channel guide, for example, highlights the Sports 30 bulletin and its non-stop updates, analysis and highlights — and it is offered by major providers including Videotron and Bell alongside RDS and RDS2. No independently published ratings figures for the channel are available, and none are asserted here.

Digital Presence

RDS Info's web presence runs through rds.ca, the RDS network's home for French-language sports news, scores and video, and the channel is also available to subscribers through the RDS streaming app, which Bell Media lists among the ways to watch the service. Its programming is promoted alongside the wider RDS and Bell Media sports offer, and clips and bulletins from the RDS newsroom circulate through the network's digital platforms.

Ownership and Organisation

RDS Info is part of Bell Media, the media division of BCE Inc., Canada's largest communications company. The channel is owned by CTV Specialty Television Inc., in which Bell Media holds 80 percent and ESPN holds 20 percent, and the broadcasting licence is held by Le Réseau des sports (RDS) inc., the licensee for the RDS group of services. It operates out of Montreal alongside RDS and RDS2, sharing the RDS newsroom that produces Sports 30 and the network's other studio programming. That shared structure is central to the channel's model: RDS Info exists so that the reporting, highlights and analysis produced for the RDS network have a permanent, always-on home between live events.

Contact and Availability

RDS Info is available across Canada on cable, satellite and IPTV services that carry the RDS family of channels, in standard definition and in high definition (1080i). Program and channel information is published at rds.ca and through Bell Media's channel pages. The channel does not publish a general public business email address, so none is listed here.