OTTAWA – Canada’s publicly traded television service providers combined lost a record 65,000 TV subscribers in their respective 2014 fiscal years (November 30/December 31, 2013 to November 30/December 31, 2014), up sharply from just a few hundred lost in their 2013 fiscal years, according to a new report released today
New research from Ottawa-based research and consulting firm Boon Dog Professional Services also shows that the publicly traded TV service providers lost 21,380 TV subscribers combined in their 2014 fiscal fourth quarters, almost double the 11,323 lost in the same periods in 2013.
“The trend continues to show the cable companies losing customers to the IPTV companies, although they lost fewer customers in 2014 than they did the previous year,” says Boon Dog Partner Mario Mota in a press release. “The problem is that IPTV subscriber growth is slowing for some companies (i.e., Telus), so we saw overall TV subscriber losses accelerate. Another firm trend is that satellite TV is now in significant decline in Canada.”
- Canada’s biggest four cable companies (Rogers, Shaw, Vidéotron, and Cogeco) combined lost 73,070 TV subscribers in their 2014 fiscal fourth quarters and 284,353 subscribers in their 2014 fiscal years
- The two satellite TV companies in Canada (Bell and Shaw Direct) lost a record 51,914 TV subscribers in their 2014 fiscal fourth quarters and 154,250 subscribers in their 2014 fiscal years
- The publicly traded IPTV providers [Bell (including Bell Aliant) and Telus] added an estimated 103,074 IPTV subscribers in their 2014 fiscal fourth quarters and 374,034 IPTV subscribers in their 2014 fiscal years.
Mota notes, however, that even with record subscriber losses, Canada’s traditional TV service providers are holding their own against a multitude of choices available to consumers to view video content. “Given that roughly 11.7 million households subscribed to a traditional TV service at the end of 2014, the 65,000 customers lost last year represents less than 1% of the total market.” More than 90% of all traditional TV service subscribers in Canada are customers of the publicly traded TV service providers.
Given that these large and best-capitalized TV service providers lost customers as a whole in 2014, Boon Dog estimates that the entire traditional TV service market declined by a slightly larger amount last year.
A full analysis is published in Boon Dog’s Canadian Digital TV Market Monitor research series. Click here for more.
