A press release by Corus Entertainment (parent company of YTV), states that as of July 19th, Bionix will be moved to Saturday evenings and cut down to two hours.
BIONIX – NEW TIMESLOT WITH NEW EPISODES!
Attention all Anime fans – Saturday evenings are all yours! Beginning Saturday, July 19 from 8 p.m. until 10 p.m., YTV’s Anime block Bionix will begin in its new timeslot with Avatar. The Anime fun won’t doesn’t stop there as this new Bionix timeslot will include new episodes of Naruto, Zatch Bell and Bleach.
Bionix is a late Friday-night block of shows on YTV that consists of several anime titles presently including Bleach, Gundam Seed Destiny, DeathNote, Full Metal Alchemist, Eureka Seven and Naruto.
(via Zannen.ca)
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It's obvious YTV wishes to wave bye-bye to anime. A real pity. They've moved "Naruto" and "Bleach" to a death-slot after midnight, comparable to the U.S. 'adult swim.' They've also moved "Blue Dragon" to a slot few people, kids or adults, are likely to watch. (One hears snide remarks about "Blue Dragon", but I'm always interested in what Akira Toriyama does.) I once talked to someone at YTV about that time they were misspelling "Full Metal Alchemist" on their promo blurbs. The ignoramus at YTV insisted they weren't making a spelling error! Whoever wrote that just plain does not understand English. Clearly, the people at YTV have no idea what they're doing. I guess they think reality tv is the next big thing so to hell with anime. Short-sighted, ignorant, and stupid. A pity.
It does certainly feel that way, unfortunately its dictated by their ratings. The target age group of YTV don't watch nearly as much animated programming as they did so all animation is seeing less and less air time. Anime in particular is often quickest to get the cut partially due to the cost of licensing it to play and a rule that dictates Canada must play a certain percentage of Canadian programming, which of course anime doesn't generally fall into. A pity though, YTV used to have the most awesome Friday line-up, back when they had shows like Witch Hunter Robin, Full Metal Alchemist and Gundam Seed.