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https://www.cantechletter.com/2015/08/will-canadians-choose-shomi-instead-of-netflix/

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Will Canadians choose Shomi instead of Netflix?

By Nick Waddell0 Comments

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Rogers and Shaw’s answer to Netflix will become available to all Canadians on Thursday.

Shomi, a subscription video-on-demand offering that launched in the first week of November and featured 11,000 hours of TV shows and 1200 movies for $8.99 a month, was available only to those with set-top boxes from the respective telco providers. Starting Thursday, all Canadians can access the service using devices such as tablets or PlayStatons.

Shomi has bolstered its content to feature much of the catalogs of HBO and Showtime, as well as hits such as “Empire” and “Jane the Virgin”

Shomi was widely seen as a defensive move for the telcos as “cord cutting” is accelerating across North America. Rival Bell launched its own streaming service, CraveTV, soon after the Rogers/Shaw collaboration.

And while Bell says it optimistic about the prospects of its offering, which will also soon be available to 11-million household instead of just 3.5-million subscribers it now reaches, the numbers says someone has to lose here. It’s unlikely the average Canadian will subscribe to two or three streaming services.

The trouble for Rogers, Shaw and Bell, is that the average Canadian already subscribes to Netflix.

Canadians are, in fact, the most voracious consumers of Netflix in the world. A third of homes with broadband subscribe to it, reaching four out of every ten English speaking Canadians.

So what will happen?

I believe eventually Shomi and CraveTV will become lost leader products for telcos as they should have been to begin with. Rogers, Shaw and Bell’s legacy cable businesses are among the sectors most affected by a generational undercurrent that they don’t seem to be taking seriously enough.

“Cord-cutting” has become the bane of cable providers’ existence, but the fast-changing face of consumer content is signaling dark days ahead for cable, as the option to avoid or drop cable service has grown more appealing and more popular than ever lately,” writes Forbes contributor Mark Hughes. Hughes points to recent surveys that show the content viewing habits of millennials is starkly different than their predecessors.

Rogers, Shaw and Bell hoped that their streaming services would be cash cows, replacing revenue lost cord cutting. Instead, they are probably set to become mere table stakes in a tough game.

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https://www.cantechletter.com/2015/08/will-canadians-choose-shomi-instead-of-netflix/

Business

BCE’s Netflix-fighting CraveTV has 730,000 users

Streaming service will be spread to all Internet users in Canada, Chief Executive Officer George Cope says.hare via Email

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Hand-out / BELL CANADA

The CraveTV streaming service will be spread to all Internet users in Canada, Chief Executive Officer George Cope says.

By:Bloomberg Published on Thu Aug 06 2015

BCE Inc., Canada’s largest telecommunications company, has signed up 730,000 subscribers for its CraveTV Internet-streaming service since debuting it in December.

That number will keep growing when BCE makes the service available to all Internet users in Canada, not just its own cable-TV customers, Chief Executive Officer George Cope said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday. It will expand the base of potential household targets to 11 million from 3.5 million, Cope said. BCE said last month it would open up CraveTV at the beginning of 2016.

“CraveTV has the content of both HBO and Showtime,” Cope said, adding that it is “already a very competitive product.”

BCE has joined other Canadian cable companies in starting up their own online-TV services to compete with Los Gatos, California-based Netflix Inc., which entered the Canadian market in 2010 and has acquired around 4 million users, Adam Shine, an analyst with the National Bank of Canada, has said. Forty percent of English-speaking Canadians now have access to a Netflix subscription, according to Media Technology Monitor, an Ottawa-based researcher.

Rogers Communications Inc. and Shaw Communications Inc. unveiled a streaming service last year called Shomi. It costs C$8.99 a month, the same as Netflix, and will be available to anyone in the coming months, Stephanie Leslie, a spokeswoman for Shomi, said in an e-mail. Leslie declined to say how many subscribers Shomi had.

For BCE, which is known by its brand name Bell, the 730,000 subscriber additions are impressive given that Dish Network Corp.’s Sling TV Internet service signed up 169,000 in its first quarter, David Heger, an analyst at Edward Jones in St. Louis, said in a phone interview.

“It’s not necessarily an apples for apples comparison, but at the same token I would think hitting 730,000-type levels is doing pretty darn well,” he said.

CraveTV, at $4 a month, features Showtime programs like “The Affair” and older Home Box Office Inc. series such as “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City.”

The service helped boost subscriber revenue in BCE’s media division compared with last year, the company said in its second-quarter report Thursday. Shares rose 0.6 percent to $54.47 at midday in Toronto. The stock is up 2.2 percent this year.