OTTAWA – Canadians continued to cut the TV cord in record (if still pretty small) numbers since launch of a CRTC-mandated skinny basic TV package on March 1st.
In the two fiscal quarters since phase one of the Commission’s new consumer choice policy came into effect (which mandated a $25 skinny basic package of over-the-air stations and must-carry channels and the launch of smaller, theme packs of channels), Canada’s publicly traded TV service providers combined lost approximately 98,500 TV subscribers, according to new research and analysis from Ottawa-based research and consulting firm Boon Dog Professional Services.
That’s a loss of 11,500 (or 13%) more TV subscribers than the 87,000 lost in the same two quarters in 2015. The service providers measured are Rogers, Shaw, Bell, Telus, Cogeco, Vidéotron and MTS.
(Ed note: According to the CRTC's latest Communications Monitoring Report, there were 11.2 million subscription TV households in Canada in August of 2015, so the 98,500 number is still below 1% of that count. However, the losses, while still small overall, have been steadily growing since 2012. It's a trend that can't be ignored.)
“The CRTC and others had hoped that giving consumers greater choice in how they subscribe to television services would reduce ‘cord-cutting’ in the traditional Canadian television system,” said Boon Dog partner Mario Mota, in a press release. “So far, that has not happened. Given the numbers, we do not expect phase two of the CRTC’s consumer choice policy to have any meaningful impact on current cord-cutting trends. In fact, the Canadian market is on pace to lose almost 200,000 TV subscribers – a record – in 2016.”
A full analysis of the latest TV subscriber metrics and forecasts will be published in the next edition of Boon Dog’s Canadian Digital TV Market Monitor research series.
