Bell’s CraveTV to go pure OTT

BCE Inc. will make its CraveTV streaming service available to all Canadians as of Jan 1., 2016, it said in a press release Monday, in what marks a change in strategy for the company. Bell Media president Mary Ann Turcke said in the press release that as “our business model has continued to evolve the time is right to also offer CraveTV as a standalone product.” The service, which was launched in December, is currently available only to customers who subscribe to TV service from Bell and partner providers, including Telus Corp. and Eastlink. “It’s a big change in strategy since Crull repeatedly said they weren’t going to do this,” broadcasting consultant Kelly Lynne Ashton said in an email. “It’s a necessary change, though, as it’s the only way they can compete with Shomi and Netflix,” she added. Crull said in March that CraveTV was developed “in conjunction with the existing TV ecosystem,” and that the company wasn’t targeting it to or making it available to cord-cutters. The company made that decision, he told The Wire Report at the time, because “we all have a vested interest in the survival and the success of the traditional linear ecosystem.” He also said at the time that CraveTV, at $4 a month, “is not a standalone, make-money value proposition for sure, but it had to do with our decision to marry it to the ecosystem, that we wanted it to be a value enhancement to that." The company did not specify how much the standalone service would cost in the press release Monday. Bell Media spokesman Scott Henderson said in an email that pricing details are “to be confirmed.” He declined to comment Monday about why the strategy has changed. Crull left the company in early April, following a controversy over his involvement in CTV’s news coverage of the CRTC. Turcke was named as his replacement. In May, Rogers Communications Inc. and Shaw Communications Inc. said that they would make their streaming service, Shomi, available to all Canadians online some time this summer. At the time, Troy Crandall, a telecom analyst with 3Macs, said that Shomi could be feasible as a standalone service at its $8.99 monthly price tag, which is the same price charged by Netflix Inc. But at $4 a month, he said he didn’t see how CraveTV’s model “could work at that price” if the service was available to everyone. The moves to untie availability of Shomi or Crave from subscriptions to specific telecom services follow the CRTC’s introduction of a new category for video-on-demand services this spring. It allows companies to offer content exclusive to certain TV service providers and operate under the digital-media exemption order, as long as they also offer that content online to all Canadians. However, the implications of that new category for Shomi and CraveTV were still unclear following the late April deadline for comments on the proposal. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Bell’s CraveTV to go pure OTT

Broadcast | July 13, 2015

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Bell’s CraveTV to go pure OTT

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