BCE/Bell recently rolled out Alt TV. It's aimed at Bell Internet customers who might otherwise not subscribe to a traditional TV package. In other words, Bell is targeting “Cord Nevers” and “Cord Cutters.”
Cord Cutters are those who’ve had a traditional cable TV subscription package (here in B.C. typically from either Shaw or Telus) but cancelled it. Cord Nevers are usually young people who do not subscribe to a TV plan when they strike out on their own and into a first home.
Content delivery companies such as Bell, contrary to what you might think, like live-streaming services since they require no set-top box and no in-home installation. They are so-called zero-touch services.
To be sure, a streaming package is going to make the companies a lot less than those $100+ full-service TV packages, but if the zero-touch model can draw in a new customer, that represents new money on the table.
Recently, the major service providers were buoyed somewhat by numbers from the CRTC, the industry regulator in Canada, showing fewer customer TV subscription cancellations in 2016 than in 2015.
However, the underlying concern is that although cord-cutting may have plateaued, the absolute number of households in Canada has increased. Census data shows about 14 million households while the number of TV subscribers sits at around 11 million.
In other words, more and more households are not signing up for TV plans in the first place.
In other words, more and more households are not signing up for TV plans in the first place. These are the Cord Nevers.
BCE Inc.’s CEO George Cope is pretty candid about the changing marketplace for his company when it comes to TV and home Internet. “We’ve got to have all the content available and then let the consumer select; that is absolutely where the market is and where we have to be.”
And that reality means BCE needs fibre to the home connections – ultra-fast and ultra-wide pipes to move large volumes of data quickly.
On a related front, Bell/BCE has been successful in what some see as a sledgehammer approach, in shutting down a major player in the TV add-on wars.
Back in June, Bell Canada, Rogers Communications, and Videotron, three major players in the home delivery of TV content in Canada, launched a legal action against TV Addons, basically a site that acts like a search engine for apps that lets users access a plethora of online TV content.
Most of the site users have the free open source media player Kodi. The TV Addons site provides, as the name suggests, add-ons to scrape content from across the Internet that can then be played through the Kodi interface.
What is unusual about the TV Addons case is that the plaintiffs obtained a so-called Anton Piller order – basically a search-and-seize warrant. Law enforcement people showed up at the owner's residence, copied everything electronic that they could, demanded all relevant access information for websites and social media accounts, and then changed all passwords so that they could no longer be used.
Although a federal court judge later declared the order null and void, an appeal was filed by Bell et al. That appeal has been granted and a further hearing is now scheduled. For all intents and purposes, TV Addons is no longer a viable business.
What is really at stake here is the meaning of copyright. Bell, for instance, wants to protect its interest in the valuable Game of Thrones TV property (although hackers have breached the HBO infrastructure where GoT is stored). It is naturally unhappy to see thousands of Canadians watching the popular program without seeing the commercial space it sells to businesses.
Canada’s updated copyright law is yet to be fully tested in court. As this column went to press, Bell floated the notion of filing a challenge under NAFTA rules (yes, that NAFTA, the one a certain president referred to as “the worst trade deal ever made”) that would require all Internet service providers to block access to websites hosting pirated content.
Good luck with that. The very notion that service providers would run blacklists is anathema to the freely accessible Internet. Let’s just say that Bell is still smarting from its loss of the simultaneous substitution of commercials during the Super Bowl TV coverage earlier this year.
Traditional TV consumption patterns are rapidly changing. Streaming solutions are part of that change, whether they are supplied by players such as Bell or whether they come through grey market boxes that access Internet repositories of pirated content.
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