The company was formed in 2011 by Michael MacMillan, former Chairman of Alliance Atlantis, with the acquisition of indie broadcaster Glassbox Television. It is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its name was chosen in reference to William Gibson's informal "Blue Ant" trilogy. On December 22, 2011, Blue Ant Media announced that Torstar had acquired a minority stake in the company. On December 21, 2011, Blue Ant Media announced that it had entered into an agreement to purchase specialty broadcaster High Fidelity HDTV. It initially purchased 29.9% of the company with the remaining 70.1% acquired when the deal was approved by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The acquisition was completed on August 1, 2012. On August 17, 2012, Blue Ant Media announced that it would be purchasing the specialty channel Bold from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for an undisclosed amount, conditional on government approval. After initially purchasing a 15% minority stake in Canadianpublishing company Quarto Communications in the summer of 2011, in December 2012, Blue Ant Media purchased the remaining shares in the company, which had been renamed Cottage Life Media. In April 2014, the company purchased a minority stake in the digital media company and multi-channel network Omnia Media. In November 2014, the company bought a majority stake in Choice TV, marking the group's first international expansion. In December 2015, Blue Ant Media and Smithsonian Networks teamed to launch Blue Skye Entertainment, a new UK-based company exclusively focused on 4K content. In 2016, Blue Ant began to engage in the children's media market, including international sales of Make it Big, Make it Small, the web series Kings of Atlantis for YouTube Red. In May 2017, Blue Ant Media bought the Asia-Pacific broadcaster Racat Group, and named its consultant Ward Platt as Blue Ant Media's CEO of kids and global networks. Among its assets were the factual producer NHNZ, Singapore-based studio Beach House Pictures, Sydney-based Northern Pictures, mobile game developer Runaway Play, and a majority stake in ZooMoo, a Singapore-based, nature-oriented children's network operating in Asia and Latin America. Raja Khanna, Blue Ant's CEO of television and digital, considered the purchase to be complementary to its Canadian operations, given their involvement in factual and nature-oriented programming. In November 2017, Raja Khanna departed from the company. In February 2018, Omnia Media was renamed Blue Ant Digital Studios, coinciding with the launch of several new original series on Facebook Watch, and an accompanying expansion beyond video gaming content. In October 2018, Blue Ant acquired the Toronto-based Saloon Media. On May 15, 2019, Blue Ant acquired the distribution rights to Jelly Jamm from Vodka Capital.
