Time for another look at where linear and streaming television are headed.
What is the situation in your household? Almost surely it isn’t just old-school linear TV. Long gone are the days when most every television set in North America was tuned to the final episode of M*A*S*H or to the last scene of Seinfeld, the series famously about nothing in particular.
Other than major sporting events, and perhaps programs such as America’s Got Talent (AGT), very little television programming today commands big real-time audiences. So much viewing is now in binge format sessions or at times other than when broadcast.
As it is, many live TV shows of the AGT variety almost immediately release clips of key parts of programs to platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
Speaking of major sporting events, this mainstay for many a cable company has also seen a move to streaming and viewing on formats other than the living room television set. Until recently, streaming major sporting events to millions of households was a technical challenge, even a potential minefield. An early entry in the field, DAZN, had troubles I addressed in a column several years ago.
Today pretty much every league has one or more streaming deals, which has led to a fragmented viewing landscape. Fans can no longer depend on that living room TV and a cable subscription to deliver every game of their favourite team.
At one time, some looked to Netflix as a way to get out of the high price of the monthly “cable hell” bill for 100-200 channels, most of which were never watched. For $5 or $6 per month, Netflix offered up a veritable cornucopia of movies. Of course the price increased over time and now sits at around $19 a month for the ad-free version.
Netflix has shown it knows how to adapt to an ever-changing viewing landscape. It successfully fought the password-sharing battle, and in the process increased its customer count significantly. Knowing that TV viewers were ditching cable subscriptions in ever-increasing numbers, Netflix struck a multi-billion-dollar deal with sporting juggernaut WWE to carry its hugely popular Monday Night Raw live “sports” programming.
This deal to bring WWE-RAW to Netflix was a blow to TSN here in Canada and to the corresponding U.S. network. Every time a program with an audience the size of RAW leaves cable for the streaming world, the cable companies’ pain increases. By some measures, streaming TV in American households now commands a larger audience than cable TV.
Here’s the problem: streaming itself is becoming fragmented. There are now so many streaming platforms available in Canada that if you were to subscribe to them all you would be paying more than you would for that cable TV hell bill.
This has led to the phenomenon of churners and chasers. In the telecom field “churn” refers to turnover. Companies such as Rogers, Bell, and TELUS want to keep churn percentages low. A two per cent churn rate means two per cent of customers are going to another provider.
A chaser is someone who signs up for a particular streaming service for a certain series, then immediately cancels once the series ends. This is a relatively new phenomenon which the streaming companies have yet to adequately address from a cost perspective.
What is the situation in my household? I still have an old-school cable TV subscription, bundled with a gigabit internet feed, costing $170 a month. We also have little-used subscriptions to Netflix and Prime Video. As for the TV, I really only watch news channels, conveniently grouped in a bloc and mostly while I’m on the treadmill. I scan through these repeatedly. Recently the provider, Rogers, added two Fox channels to this block. Unfortunately I can’t block them, so they stay there for entertainment rather than for actual news!
Cable and internet service providers (in this market they are primarily TELUS and Rogers, formerly Shaw) may finally be facing additional competition. As this column went to press, the new owner of Freedom Mobile – Videotron – announced it was rolling out a home internet service starting at $45 a month, along with a streaming TV package starting at $19 a month.
Over the next five years we should get a clearer impression of just how the media landscape is settling. Here in Canada, we may well see one-time powerhouse Corus Entertainment, which operates radio and TV stations across the country, disappear. Its share price has plummeted from the $20-30 range into penny stock levels.
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