TVA, CTV, Global, Noovo and most linear channels are not on the verge of death, but they are not doing well.
Every time the big bosses do their accounts for the annual shareholders’ meeting, you’d think they were about to “request assisted death” for their channels! Even though TVA sits at the top of the ratings charts, the network lost $47.9 million last year. The current year doesn’t look any better. In the first quarter, TVA lost $17.9 million. Will the painful restructuring plan launched last November change things?
Bell’s channels, including Noovo, are not in better health. Almost all of them spent last year in the red, losing $583.7 million. Even though Bell has shed more than 1,300 people from its staff, the financial results of its televisions will not be better this year. Fortunately, Bell, Videotron and Rodgers (Citytv) have other irons in the fire.
IT’S WORSE IN ENGLISH CANADA
If the situation of our French-language networks is so bad while their ratings are the envy of the world, it is needless to say that television is not doing any better in English Canada. The network in the worst shape is Global. Corus inherited Global when it acquired Shaw Media. There are legacies we would rather not have.
If you own Corus stock, you can give it to your friends without breaking the bank, because it’s worth only 15 cents now. It was worth $25 10 years ago. To call it valuable is an understatement, since Corus’ market cap is now just $29 million. With its total debt now exceeding $1 billion, the stock is probably worthless.
THE INCONSISTENCIES OF OUR SYSTEM
Corus’ management is certainly not to be cited as an example, but a good part of its misfortunes must be attributed to the increasingly insurmountable difficulties that our linear chains must face: the meteoric rise of streamers Americans, an incongruous share of advertising revenues that the digital giants monopolize in our country (around 75%) and, to a lesser degree, the CRTC which has maintained strict rules for investment in content production for our channels, while American platforms were not subject to any rules.
Year after year, more and more viewers are abandoning cable and satellite to subscribe to platforms that they join via the Internet. Ten or 12 years ago, a Canadian platform bringing together the best of our channels’ original content could have created a barrier to American platforms. Competition between our channels and the short-sightedness of their owners prevented the creation of such a platform. Too late, our networks ended up creating Tou.TV, Illico, Crave and StackTV (Shaw). As for Shomi (Global), it was practically stillborn.
Digital platforms are the future of television. I will come back to this in my column on Thursday.
