OTTAWA —Canada’s publicly traded television service providers lost a new record number of traditional pay-TV subscribers in 2019, continuing the trend of accelerating TV cord-cutting in Canada, according to new research from Ottawa-based research and consulting firm Boon Dog Professional Services Inc.
The continued launch of new Internet streaming services and the growth of such services in Canada, a slowdown in the growth of IPTV, and continued record losses of subscribers of cable TV all contributed to a record cumulative loss by the big Canadian TV service providers of an estimated 278,000 TV subscribers in their respective 2019 fiscal periods ended November 30/December 31, 2019.
That’s up sharply from an estimated loss of about 170,000 TV subscribers in the previous year.
The publicly trade companies in the research include Bell Canada, Rogers, Shaw/Shaw Direct, Vidéotron, Cogeco, and Telus. The numbers are rounded numbers and exclude any acquisitions and divestitures, says the report.
Boon Dog estimates the number of Canadian households subscribing to a traditional TV service dropped to below 10.7 million in 2019. However, the traditional TV service providers, especially the cable providers, are losing pace with household growth in the country and therefore TV subscription penetration is declining at a greater level than simply the cord-cutting numbers suggest.
“As an example, Rogers’ TV penetration as a percentage of homes passed was 35% at the end of 2019, compared to 50% just five years ago (2014),” said Boon Dog partner Mario Mota, in the press release. “Similarly, Vidéotron’s TV penetration as a percentage of homes passed was 52% at the end of 2019, compared to 64% in 2014.”
According to its latest projections, Boon Dog estimates that the number of Internet streaming subscribers in Canada will surpass the number of traditional TV (cable, IPTV, and satellite TV) subscribers this year. “To put that into perspective, it will have taken Internet streaming about a decade since its launch in Canada to achieve traditional TV’s current subscriber level built over more than six decades,” says Mota. “That fact truly captures the transformational and rapid change that is occurring in the TV distribution market.”
A full analysis of the latest TV subscriber metrics and subscriber forecasts will be published in the next report in Boon Dog’s Canadian Digital TV Market Monitor research series.
Published on a quarterly basis, Boon Dog’s Canadian Digital TV Market Monitor is a comprehensive independent research series on the Canadian digital television distribution market. It tracks the growth and development of the traditional total TV and digital TV services market, providing information such as subscriber data and forecasts, total TV and digital TV market share by technology, estimates of households with HDTV set-top boxes, PVRs/DVRs, and those that are VOD-ready. The research series is in its 19th year of publication.
