Trying past the glitz of Canadian broadcasters rolling out their newest new and returning U.S. sequence at their latest upfront displays in Toronto, you’d have seen native networks placing their greatest foot ahead in pitches to native media patrons and businesses.
However beneath the floor, the Canadians are paddling furiously to maintain tempo in a rapidly-changing TV trade the place elevated cord-cutting and a unbroken linear TV advert recession has native gamers chasing viewers on-line with expensive American sequence to maintain tempo with Netflix.
Forward of the Banff World Media Competition this week, Warner Bros. Discovery did offers to maneuver standard way of life and leisure manufacturers like HGTV, Meals Community, Cooking Channel, Magnolia Community and OWN from Corus Leisure to rival Rogers Media and Sports activities. Canadians Drew and Jonathan Scott of Property Brothers fame on HGTV are mainstays of the approach to life and leisure channel standard throughout North America.
Corus will retain the children channels Grownup Swim and Cartoon Community in Canada. And WBD switched different leisure manufacturers like Discovery, Motor Pattern, Science, Animal Planet and I.D. from longtime properties at Bell Media to Rogers. Multi-year offers signed by Rogers – which has no streaming platform of its personal– with NBCUniversal and WBD will see the channel pick-ups land on NBCUniversal’s Bravo channel to launch in Canada later this yr.
The realignment of high American channels north of the border goals to permit native broadcasters to proceed following TV viewers on-line, and focusing on the place doable Canadians more and more favoring catch-up viewing on streaming platforms.
Execs at Rogers Media and Sports activities weren’t accessible for touch upon their deal-making, however community president Colette Watson in an announcement mentioned: “We’re evolving our enterprise to mirror the place shoppers are going, bringing the perfect mixture of U.S. and Canadian content material to audiences in the best way they wish to watch it. This funding additionally advances our place as a robust Canadian broadcaster that may compete with overseas streamers.”
Elsewhere at Bell Media, which operates the CTV linear TV community and its Crave streaming platform, the acquisition of latest and returning American exhibits on the latest LA Screenings was as essential as ever. “Wherever the place we may get Crave rights for sequence we have been shopping for for CTV, we did. So that you’ll see this yr we picked up extra Crave rights than now we have in earlier years,” Justin Stockman, vp of content material growth & programming at Bell Media, instructed The Hollywood Reporter.
That’s a sea-change from many years previous the place the purchasing methods of Canadian personal broadcasters on the LA Screenings was, the place doable, mirroring the primetime grids of cross-border U.S. networks to turn out to be media powers by way of pricey provide offers with the most important studios.
However the rise of Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video as dominant streaming gamers north of the border has drastically diminished advert revenues for Canadian TV networks as advertising {dollars} shift from conventional TV to on-line video platforms. As well as, legacy Canadian networks face a higher impression from financial disruption as they lack the size of the most important studios and U.S. networks as they battle for survival and supremacy within the evolving streaming period.
That has Canadian broadcasters in a pivot from serving cable prospects to more and more on-line TV viewers and subscribers to outlive the withering results of cord-cutting and cord-nevers and a chronically delicate linear TV advert market. “They (American streamers) have brought about a disruption within the advert market, simply as they did within the subscription tv market and that creates new aggressive challenges for us,” Troy Reeb, govt vp of networks and content material at Corus Leisure, instructed THR.
In opposition to rival Bell Media and its Crave streaming platform, Corus has its Stack TV providing and is a accomplice for Pluto TV north of the border to fend off new competitors from Netflix, Prime Video and different U.S. gamers introducing ad-tiers that minimize into advert income that used to go to the Canadians.
“The outdated world of 57 channels of nothing has now come to the world of 5700 exhibits accessible on a (streaming) menu, however nonetheless nothing to decide on,” Reeb mentioned of the worth proposition to Canadian media patrons of his World Tv linear TV community having the ability to air a U.S. sequence in the identical time slot because the U.S. primetime schedule, after which permitting catch-up viewing on Stack TV.
“The larger our streaming ambitions have gotten with Stack TV, the extra now we have seen individuals watching TV in the old fashioned approach,” Reeb added as Canadian comes first to the linear TV community when a present first debuts, earlier than logging on for catch up viewing.
However following Canadians on-line, particularly for these looking for catch-up viewing, is expensive by way of securing and renewing digital rights from main studio suppliers more and more going international with their streaming platforms.