OTTAWA – Cable’s foray into the telephone market was the main reason that cable distributors did not lose market share to competitors last year, says Statistics Canada, the first time this has happened since satellite television was introduced in 1997.
Cable’s total number of subscribers to the principal services, (television, Internet access and telephone), reached 14.2 million on August 31, 2007 – 1.6 million more subscribers compared with the same period in 2006 – and more than half of these new customers were telephone service subscribers.
In their official release bulletin called The Daily, StatsCan noted that while there were fewer new traditional television services customers for cable distributors, 2007 saw a net increase of 126,862 total subscribers, the second-best results in 10 years. It concluded that many of these new customers are a result of the industry’s expansion into the telephone market.
This trend also had a major impact on the source of operating revenues for the cable industry. Cable’s television subscription revenues dropped from 92% of total subscription revenues at the beginning of the decade, to 61% in 2007. Telecommunication services (including high speed Internet) subscription revenue jumped 32% to $2.6 billion from 2006 to 2007 alone.
Canadian households and businesses continued to connect to the Internet via cable in large numbers, albeit at a slower pace than in the past, the report continued. The number of subscribers to this service grew from 4 million in 2006 to 4.5 million in 2007.
The number of wireless television services subscribers, largely by satellite, grew 1.4% to 2.7 million in 2007.
For more information on the report, click here.
