Three years after splitting its catalog into two separate paid platforms, Quebecor is changing its strategy. Starting in October, Club Illico and Vrai will form a single video-on-demand service that will be called Illico +.
The company made the announcement Monday morning in a press release. The cost of the subscription for future customers will be specified by October 23, the date on which the merger will be officially sealed. Those who are already subscribers to Vrai and Illico should pay the same price.
Let’s recall that in the fall of 2021, Quebecor launched Vrai, a service entirely dedicated to documentaries and reality TV, with great fanfare. Videotron and Telus customers could subscribe for $5 per month; the price charged to others was $15 per month, almost as much as the basic Netflix plan without advertising. Since then, Club Illico, which had identical rates, no longer offered documentaries and essentially only offered fiction films and series.
A market in consolidation
According to figures from the Académie de la transformation numérique (ATN) at Université Laval, 12% of Quebecers were subscribed to Club Illico in 2023, which placed the platform ahead of its rivals Crave and Tou.tv Extra, owned by Bell and Radio-Canada respectively. However, its number of users was declining, as 17% of Quebecers indicated that they paid for a subscription to Club Illico in 2019. The subscription rate for Vrai has never been measured by the ATN.
The number of video-on-demand services has grown significantly worldwide in recent years, particularly during the pandemic. Long dominated by Netflix, this market has experienced phenomenal growth, but is now entering a phase of consolidation. In the US market, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery now offer their Disney+, Hulu and Max services as a bundle. In France, the Salto platform ceased operations in 2023, three years after its launch.
The rate of Quebecers subscribing to at least one paid on-demand listening service exploded between 2019 and 2021, rising from 53% to 71%. It has since tended to decline slightly. In 2023, 65% of Quebecers said they subscribed to at least one platform.