By Ken Kelley
Has media streaming reached peak oversaturation? It is a question Corus president and CEO Doug Murphy pondered during his appearance at BMO’s 22nd annual Media & Telecom Conference on Tuesday.
While discussing the similarities between linear and digital advertising with moderator Tim Casey, Murphy acknowledged that regardless of how the public consumes television content – whether via a traditional cable television subscription or by an offering such as Corus’ wildly popular StackTV, which he said continues adding upwards of 100,000 subs per quarter – channel surfing appears to be an underrated, and arguably underappreciated, phenomenon.
“StackTV has demonstrated to both Canada and the world that the channel business is not necessarily going away, it’s just being reaggregated on a streaming platform,” Murphy said.
“[Combine that] with the fact that 40% of all hours viewed on StackTV is the Leanback television experience on the channel guide, I think speaks volumes to the fact the television experience in and of itself has value. People are getting streaming fatigue, trying to find something on demand, when sometimes just sitting back and surfing channels can be a relaxing experience.”
While acknowledging much has been made about the impacts that streaming has had upon traditional service providers, Murphy believes Canadian broadcasters are in a much stronger position today than prior to 2015 when the CRTC passed the “skinny TV bundle” mandate.
“That has been helpful because our average bundle in Canada is about half of what it is in the U.S. and that’s why 74% of Canadians still subscribe to the channels business,” he said. “That combination of the resiliency of the channels business, the concentration, collaboration, integration, and the penetration of pay TV in Canada, means that this is a very unique market with much more sustainability and resiliency, than in the U.S. and other markets around the world.”
Murphy did not offer any predictions as to the possible results of the impending federal election, but he feels Bill C-10, a piece of legislation that was intended to modernize the Broadcasting Act that died when Parliament was dissolved, has helped shine a light on the challenges Canadian broadcasters are facing.
“Canadians now understand the inequities we’re facing as broadcasters in Canada,” he said.
“[But] every political party has now got broadcasting on their platform and they’ve reticulated plans that I think are very sensible in all cases. So I think we’ve been successful in getting Canadians and politicians to pay attention to the fact the Broadcasting Act was written in 1991 and that we operate underneath these burdens that are ridiculous when we have unfettered trillion dollar market cap competitors coming into the marketplace and paying nothing into the system. I do believe that in the next six to eight quarters, we’re going to be operating within a new regulatory regime and I expect more flexibility in that regard.”
For more from this year’s BMO Media & Telecom Conference, click here for an article on Bell and Rogers and here for one on Cogeco.
