Rising Evidence of Cord-Cutting in Canada

OTTAWA: Boon Dog Professional Services, an Ottawa­â€based research and consulting firm that back in December 2010 said that cord-cutting was not a reality in Canada, has changed its tune, citing "the first concrete signs" of cord-cutting in the Canadian traditional TV service market.

Publicly traded TV service providers lost an estimated 5,394 TV subscribers in the first quarter of 2013. This followed a combined decrease of an estimated 8,175 in the fourth quarter of 2012. "This marks the first time that the traditional TV subscription market has declined in size since essentially the launch of cable TV in the early 1950s," the firm reports.

At the end of 2012, 88 percent of all TV subscription households in Canada received a digital TV offering, which is roughly 10.5 million households. Cable had a share of 61 percent of digital households at the end of 2012, followed by satellite at 27 percent and IPTV at 12 percent. This compares to 62 percent for cable, 29 percent for satellite and 8 percent for IPTV a year earlier.

By the end of 2015, Boon Dog predicts that digital TV shares will be 58 percent for cable, 21 percent for satellite and 21 percent for IPTV.

Mario Mota, Boon Dog partner and principal author of the Canadian digital TV market monitor research series, said: “While the recent decline in subscribers in Canada is small relative to the size of the total TV market, we now have two consecutive quarters of data for the Canadian market that confirms that cord‐cutting is a reality here too.”