BANFF – Three days of great weather, stunning scenery, clean mountain air and a ton of networking and learning made for another super CCSA CONNECT conference, where much of the talk surrounded the lengthy and somewhat contentious TV Policy Review hearing.
After CRTC vice-chairman broadcasting Tom Pentefountas opened the conference Monday morning with his speech (one which pretty much stayed away from the hearing), one of the conference’s sponsors AMC’s Lesley Fields, showed she’d been listening to the Commission’s Let’s Talk TV hearing when she noted she felt nervous following Pentefountas saying: “I feel the need to hand over the ratings for The Walking Dead… which I’m more than happy to do.”
Of the afternoon sessions, the most interesting was the presentation by Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin, who broke down global trends in video that show despite the crush of content uploaded constantly to YouTube, user engagement in the Google-owned portal is pretty flat. The CCSA had an artist work live, documenting what Martin had to say (see illustration above by Aftab Erfan of Tim Merry Associates).
“There is complete stagnation in both the users and number of videos viewed online,” she told delegates. While people upload more than 24 hours of new video every minute to YouTube, the numbers of videos viewed not growing very well, showing a compound annual growth rate of just 12%.
A huge part of the problem in building audiences on that platform is that “discoverability is really difficult”, meaning people have to sift through all kinds of dirt to find a diamond. Even if they do find a neat, short video, stickiness remains poor (people don’t remember how they found it and might not return to that YT channel).
As well, the most popular content creators on YouTube are starting to bristle at the fact the company takes 45% of every ad dollar spent against great content that draws viewers and ad dollars. “So the content guys are losing money” because they “can’t survive with YouTube taking 45 cents of every dollar,” she said.
Martin’s talk was well-received by delegates, whose questions inevitably turned to the CRTC TV hearing when one asked about unbundling cable packages in favour of pick and pay. “Hopefully they will give you pricing power with all this,” she said, later adding that when bundles go, the money supporting niche channels and special content diminishes. “It destroys the content makers when you unbundle a TV system,” she said.
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The CCSA also handed out its annual awards, including giving out hardware for its I *heart* local cable project, which pulled in over 350,000 votes in the past 12 months. Winners of these prestigious awards were announced in July and all were honoured Monday night – complete with videos showing the winning efforts.
The CCSA supplier of the year was an American cable company, of all things. Massillon (Ohio) Cable. That independent created its own TV Everywhere platform and then turned it over to the National Cable Television Co-operative in the States to run and administer. Over 100 U.S. systems are now using the platform and over a dozen CCSA members are launching or going to launch it. Paul Downs (right) of Nexicom Group (the first Canadian cable company to roll out the Massillon solution) accepted the award.
The member of the year award went to Execulink Telecom for its work on behalf of 
members and Ian Stevens (right) was on hand to accept that prize. Next year's CONNECT conference will be held September 20-22 at Mont Tremblant (photos by Dale Cook and Greg O'Brien).
Coopérative de câblodistribution de l'arrière pays won three I *heart* local cable awards. President Stephane Arsenault (left) accepted the award from Alyson Townsend and emcee Greg O'Brien of Cartt.ca.
Lisa Ouroumis
, left, of Rogers Media and Amy Meunier of TbayTel.
Jim Johnson (left) a
nd Shawn Praskey of Corus Entertainment, which was the Presenting Sponsor of the event.
On the Sh
owcase show floor.
Delegates taking in t
he seminars Monday afternoon.
CCSA board chairman Dave Baxte
r, Westman Communications.
