OTTAWA – Traditional broadcasting media rebounded closer to pre-pandemic levels for advertising revenues in 2021, but still lagged behind the last complete reporting of pre-pandemic data in 2019, according to data released this month by the CRTC.
While conventional and discretionary television service revenues increased by 6.9% ($91 million) and 0.8% ($30 million) respectively compared to 2020, those numbers are lower when compared to 2019 – whose conventional TV service revenues totaled $1.56 billion compared to 2021’s $1.4 billion, while 2019’s revenue for discretionary was $4.2 billion compared to 2021’s $3.9 billion.
Overall traditional broadcasting revenue saw a small decrease of 0.4% from the previous year, which is attributable by CRTC data mainly to commercial radio declines. Total revenue in that sector in 2021 was 1.07 billion, a decline from the nearly $1.5 billion in 2019, which was the last complete pre-pandemic year recorded, according to the data.
Canadian broadcasting industry contributions to Canadian content was also down 5.3% compared to 2012, with radio carrying the most significant decline in contributions – almost 55% compared to 2019 and 62.3% compared to 2012. Broadcast distribution undertaking (BDU) contributions are down 21.3% since 2012, which the regulator said is in line with revenue and subscription declines.
However, since 2017, expenditures by conventional and discretionary TV stations on news programming have increased by 5.6%, which the CRTC data attribute to locally reflective news programming revenues received by conventional TV stations from those broadcasting undertakings. Meanwhile, radio station expenditures on that type of programming have increased by 6% to $100 million. Viewing share of news programing during the pandemic increased by about 2.5 percentage points – up to 16 and 17% of total viewership from 13 and 15% on English and French-language news programming between 2013 and 2019.
This past year’s profitability either improved or remained similar to the 2020 year, the data show, attributed in part to continued pandemic subsidies and adaptation by the industry to pressures on revenues – that is, reductions in operating expenditure in radio (16.5%), discretionary (4.7%), private conventional TV (4.6%) and the BDUs (3.8%).
Pandemic assistance in the 2021 broadcast year was down by 55% to $95 million from $209 million, over 75% of which was from the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy that was intended to keep employees on the payroll.
The regulator’s data verifies a Media Technology Monitor (MTM) report from the fall of last year that said 22% of anglophones (from 5% in 2012) and 15% of francophones (from 2% in 2012) 18 and over watch TV exclusively online.
The CRTC’s data was collected from sources including CBC/SRC, MTM, Omdia, Numeris, streaming audio services, subscription-based video-on-demand services, transactional video-on-demand services, and advertising video-on-demand services.
