Canal D, Séries Plus, Évasion… In this new television season, Quebec has around thirty specialized channels, but for how long? More and more Quebecers are unsubscribing from cable and turning to online listening platforms, leading some to say that this vast television offer may have become too abundant for a market of less than seven million French speakers. .
“Do specialty channels have a future? I think so, but it’s obvious that digital has changed everything. In the long term, there may be a consolidation. It may be that channels are called upon to disappear or to regroup, because at the moment, the offer is really immense, ”underlines Sylvain Lafrance, vice-president of French Services at Radio-Canada from 2005 to 2011.
During his reign, specialty channels experienced dazzling growth in Quebec, to the detriment of generalist channels. And for good reason: these pay stations gathered 31% of the ratings in 2005, a proportion that would reach more than 46% just five years later, in 2010.
Despite everything, Sylvain Lafrance remembers that he was already seeing the first signs of losing momentum at the time. On the one hand because the first digital platforms were appearing and were already questioning the cable business model. On the other hand, because the cable channels have thus begun to acquire similar content and to move away from their initial mandate.
Channels may be called upon to disappear or to regroup, because at the moment, the offer is really huge
“Originally, the channels had to respond to a specific niche and no other channel should have the same mandate. But the CRTC relaxed its regulations, and the specialty channels all started to look a little alike, except for the news channels and the sports channels. This is also part of the problem today. When it comes to choosing their subscription, consumers no longer know how to tell the difference between the channels,” notes Mr. Lafrance, now Director of the Media Department at HEC Montréal.
Downward trend
According to the Université Laval Center for Media Studies, specialty channel subscription revenues fell 10% between 2016 and 2020. Advertising revenues, for their part, plummeted 31% between 2014 and 2020.
Since then, the situation has not improved. The ratings for all cable channels even fell by 3% between 2019 and 2021, unheard of, while generalist stations regained market share.
Despite this rather gloomy overview, Daniel Giroux, who is a researcher at the Center for Media Studies, does not share Sylvain Lafrance’s predictions. In the medium term, he does not expect several specialty channels to disappear completely from the airwaves.
“They will rather adjust expenses accordingly for a few years before closing,” he says. Canal D, Séries Plus, Vrak and all those channels can very well broadcast the same programs for 20 years. It’s not TV that’s very expensive to make. »
Daniel Giroux recalls that the minimum threshold of original productions on these channels is determined by the CRTC according to their income at the time when they renew their broadcasting license. Does this mean that we should expect even less Quebec content on these channels in the coming years?
Corus (Historia, Séries Plus, Télétoon) is already opening the door to it. “If revenues drop, there will actually be less content here, or the quality will take a hit. Fortunately, revenues are still there, so there are no plans to reduce our investments in original productions for the moment, ”we take care to indicate by email.
The cable in decline
On the side of Bell Media (Canal D, Z, Investigation, Vrak and others), we prefer to expose the good results of certain channels in particular age groups. At Quebecor (Zeste, Évasion, Casa, etc.), we pride ourselves on having doubled investments in the production of Quebec content in 10 years thanks to the Club illico and Vrai platforms. “The TVA Group’s specialty channels are doing well. They are complementary to other platforms,” it is emphasized.
Radio-Canada (ICI Artv, Explora) recognizes a loss of subscribers “like all the other specialty channels”, but still rules out the idea of reducing the amount of original content.
“Yes, there is a decline in subscribers, but it’s a slow decline, it’s not a fall. What we think is that these are people who had us in their package and who did not look at us. We don’t see a considerable drop in ratings,” adds Dario LeBlanc, director of specialty channels at Radio-Canada.
Mr. LeBlanc admits that the public broadcaster may no longer launch the science channel Explora in the current context. In 2010, two years before the arrival of Explora, nearly 90% of Quebecers were customers of a cable service. Today they are 66%. In 2021, for the first time, there were more Quebecers (71%) subscribing to a streaming platform than to cable.