OTTAWA – While Canadian viewers continue to cut their TV cords, they still remain a small fraction of the total TV market, says new research released Wednesday.
Ottawa-based research and consulting firm Boon Dog Professional Services said that the big, publicly traded traditional TV service providers – Rogers, Shaw/Shaw Direct, BCE, Videotron, Cogeco, Telus, and MTS, combined lost 202,000 TV subscribers in their respective 2016/2017 fiscal years, up from 160,000 lost in their 2015/2016 fiscal years.
But the report found a shift in trends, noting that the cable companies lost fewer subscribers and that the IPTV providers saw subscriber growth slow significantly.
“The subscriber trend story of 2016 is the significant slowdown of IPTV subscriber growth and the improvement in cable TV subscriber losses, which are directly related,” said Boon Dog partner Mario Mota, in the news release. “The major IPTV providers added almost two times fewer subscribers in 2016 than they did in 2015 due to limited IPTV footprint expansion and competition from the cable companies. In past years, strong IPTV subscriber growth largely offset subscriber declines by the cable and satellite TV companies, but with IPTV slowing considerably in 2016 we saw the overall TV subscriber loss in Canada accelerate to a new record level.”
Mota noted, however, that even with record subscriber losses, Canada’s traditional TV service providers continue to hold their own against the many video content options.
“Given that roughly 11.3 million households subscribed to a traditional TV service at the end of 2016, the 202,000 customers lost last year represents only 2% of the total market”, he added.
A full analysis of the latest TV subscriber metrics and forecasts will be published in the next report in Boon Dog’s Canadian Digital TV Market Monitor research series.
