It’s been just over one year since the CRTC mandated Canada’s BDUs to provide a more stripped-down, basic TV subscription offering (known colloquially as “skinny basic”) and now just over half of Canadians have become familiar, according to a new study by the Media Technology Monitor (MTM).

The $25-max “basic” offering was introduced as part of the CRTC’s efforts to combat dissatisfaction among television subscribers who no longer wanted to pay high prices for packages including channels they didn’t want. Subscription numbers have been in decline, with MTM’s most recent numbers showing penetration of overall pay TV subscriptions at 73%, down from 75% in fall 2016.

Now, according to the MTM, some 57% of Canadians are aware that the skinny offering exists. For millennials aged 18 to 34, however, that number falls to less than half (44%).

While the MTM study describes overall awareness as “moderate,” only 12% of respondents to its mixed-method survey reported having a skinny basic package. Of those subscribers, the largest uptake (15%) was among households with an income of $35,000 to $75,000.

Additionally, the MTM survey found that fewer than 30% of skinny basic subscribers were not previously pay TV subscribers, meaning the majority of subscribers were existing TV customers who were likely looking to cut costs.

Meanwhile, a new report from Ottawa research firm Boon Dog Professional Services shows Canadians are still cutting the cord, but the rate of cord-cutting itself has slowed.

Boon Dog’s research found that Canada’s publicly traded television service providers lost a total of 100,931 customers in the first six months of 2017 – but that’s 22% fewer than the customers lost in the same period of 2016 (128,961).

So is that a sign of a larger trend? Mario Mota, partner at Boon Dog, told Playback‘s sister publication Media in Canada that the pattern for cord-cutting in the last four years has mostly been one of acceleration.

But when breaking down individual company data, Mota said it may not be an industry-wide trend. “[The slow-down] is largely because of Shaw’s BlueSky TV,” he said, referring to the new IPTV that includes voice command and advanced search features. Those gains skewed what otherwise were typical loss numbers.

Indeed, Shaw reported a net addition of 1,364 customers in the first six months, while Shaw Direct reported 1,952 new customers. The only other provider to post gains was Telus, with 11,000 new customers (this gain was due largely to a number of wholesale satellite TV subscribers sold from BCE to Telus).

Most of the losses for each BDU were on par with the previous year’s. Rogers posted a net loss of 49,000 for the two quarters, the exact same as Q1 and Q2 2016. Videotron lost 34,200, down slightly from 39,400 in the first six months of 2016. Cogeco lost 11,154, down slightly from 13,952.

The only other anomaly was BCE, which posted a net loss of 20,893 in Q1 and Q2 2017. During the same period of 2016, BCE technically posted net growth of 17,185 subscribers, however Mota said the number had been altered retroactively to include customers from Manitoba Telecom Services, which it acquired in early 2017 (Mota presented the info in this format to provide a more direct comparison between the 2016 and 2017 totals).

While Mota said it was interesting that this was the first period that showed a possible leveling out of cord-cutting, he added that it may not be time to exhale a sigh of relief just yet. “There’s the old saying ‘a quarter doesn’t make a trend.’ Well, two quarters don’t really make a trend either,” he said.

But, he said, with Rogers set to launch its own IPTV service in 2018, he wants to keep an eye on the market. “It’s too early to say if we’ve turned a corner, but it’s definitely something we want to watch.”

Image: Shutterstock

From Media in Canada