Sun News Network, a news channel belonging to the Quebecor media group, went off the air Friday after failing to find an audience after four years in existence.

The "Fox News of the North," as the conservative-leaning channel was sometimes called, was never able to recover after Quebecor sold its English-language newspapers to its competitor Postmedia, depriving it of an important source of content.

Only the Sun News logo appeared Friday morning on the television channel and its corresponding Internet site. Two hundred employees lost their jobs.

The head of Quebecor's media group and Sun Media, Julie Tremblay, said she was disappointed the news channel failed to gain a large enough audience to survive, while blaming constraints on distribution imposed by Canadian authorities.

"Over the past four years, we tried everything we could to achieve sufficient market penetration to generate the profits needed to operate a national news channel. Sadly, the numerous obstacles to carriage that we encountered spelled the end of this venture," Tremblay said

She said the Sun Media Corporation had tried without success to find a buyer for the channel, but with losses mounting it had no choice but to shut it down.

"The closure is regrettable for the Canadian broadcasting system, which is losing a distinctively Canadian voice in the national news space, and also, most importantly, for all the Sun News employees who are losing their jobs," she said.

In launching the news channel in April, 2011, Quebecor's then CEO, Pierre-Karl Peladeau, touted it as a challenge to the dominance of Canada's Anglophone news media.