TORONTO – Launching next Thursday for customers of Bell, Telus, Bell Aliant and EastLink is the traditional TV industry’s latest salvo in the battle to retain customers by providing more content to television subscribers on more devices at any time.
This morning at the Bell TIFF Lightbox, the company officially revealed CraveTV, a $4-a-month service which will give subscribers to a traditional TV package access to more than 10,000 hours of content on their handsets, tablets, PCs and their regular set top boxes. It will also be available soon on other platforms such as AppleTV, Chromecast and Xbox.
Costing about as much as a latte (thus the code-name Project Latte), CraveTV “brings simplicity, ubiquity, accessibility, and premium content to Canadian TV lovers at an unbeatable value,” according to the company’s press release. It also brings a retail price less than half of shomi, the Rogers and Shaw streaming service launched last month at $8.99/mo. Of course, each offers different, exclusive, content.
As it stands right now, Rogers and Shaw customers are the only ones with access to shomi and customers of the above-mentioned carriers will be the only ones with access to CraveTV at launch next week. Carriers also offer subscriber-authenticated TV Everywhere services to their customers such as CTVGO, TMNGO, ShawGo, Hollywood Suite GO, Rogers Anyplace TV, and others, for no extra charge, each of which have various amounts and types of content available to viewers. So there is a lot in the non-linear/TVE/VOD/SVOD video market at the moment for consumers to digest.
CraveTV, however, has a different value proposition as it will have past and current seasons of popular Bell shows such as Big Bang Theory, Saving Hope, Nurse Jackie, and Orphan Black, as well as libraries of past hits like Cheers, Seinfeld, Sex and the City and Monty Python. It will also launch some original series within the first three months: Manhattan, Deadbeat and Bosch.
The service will also test sneak-peek’s of Bell’s Canadian content, showing episodes a day earlier than on the linear schedule. So Saving Hope will be made available Wednesday at 9 on CraveTV and then at it’s regular time at 9 on Thursdays.
CraveTV will also launch new content every Friday and “a buzzy, tent-pole hit once every month,” said Bell Media SVP programming Mike Cosentino during the press launch. At launch, the content will be 96% episodic TV series. Thirty percent of it will be past seasons of current series with 61% drama and 22% comedies. The rest are documentaries and other formats.
Bell Media president Kevin Crull said for the past three months the company has been pitching the service to other Canadian BDUs to sell as an add-on to their customers, and added that it is close to launch with several Canadian Cable Systems Alliance (CCSA) members as well as Northwestel (a Bell division).
One thing you won’t see on CraveTV at launch are ads. While there will be product promos and perhaps some sponsorships, viewers won’t have to sit through the usual ad load they have to when watching a program on the linear system. Crull said the company was going for a user experience that was as clean and user-friendly as possible – and said the service may well carry advertisements in the future.
Crull also wouldn’t say whether or not the CraveTV will be made available as a true over-the-top offering. That’s not in the cards now, he said but “we’re keeping all of our options open for the future,” he added. Right now, it’s a complementary, premium product “at an incredibly great value,” he added.
As a publicity stunt, six people – Bell is calling them Cravers – will sit in a glass apartment next week in the parking lot of Bell Media HQ at 299 Queen Street West in attempt to break the world record for consecutive hours of TV watching, which is 90 straight hours.
