Once upon a time, Canadian cable customers were unhappy.
They were so unhappy, in fact, that the
CRTC actually noticed, and held hearings. They asked Canadians what was wrong with Canada's cable television options; they asked consumers what they wanted to buy, and how much they were willing to pay for it.
The answer was clear: Canadians wanted pick-and-pay. They wanted a bare-bones package, at a reasonable rate, that they could supplement with the additional channels they wanted, and only those channels. They wanted reasonable access to the content they wanted to see, at a reasonable price, with no onerous conditions or restrictions.
Given those things, Canadians would happily pay for cable; in the absence of those things, they would happily choose Netflix instead; and, if Netflix failed to provide the content they wanted to watch, then they'd pirate it, rather than continuing to pay through the nose for bundles that forced them to pay a premium for channels they never watched, just to access to the few that they were interested in.
Canada's cable companies, long used to dictating terms to customers that lacked other options, wanted to continue restricting the options and charging more than was reasonable or fair, and they lobbied hard for the status quo. The CRTC, somewhat surprisingly, sided with consumers on this one, and mandated $25 skinny cable packages, along with individually-priced channels that customers could pick and choose.
What cable companies actually provided, though, was shit.
You see, while they were legally required to have a basic package, they weren't required to advertise it, and many didn't -- consumers had to know about the $25 skinny package, ask for it specifically, and insist on getting it, rather than being shunted back into the bundle ecosystem. Additional fees were added to the $25 skinny packages that the bundles didn't have; additional channels saw stand-alone costs of cost four or five times what they cost when bundled by cable companies.
The result was skinny packages that the cable companies weren't actively selling, and had made so unpalatable that customers weren't interested in buying them anyway.
The CRTC was flooded with complaints, as customers who'd wanted a fairly-priced, basic, a la carte cable option, found that it simply didn't exist, in spite of the CRTC's mandate. Cable companies smugly declared this to be a good thing -- evidence, basically, that they'd been right all along, and that "skinny" basic cable packages had been proven to be unnecessary.
When asked whether nearly 600 complaints is concerning, [CRTC spokeswoman Patricia] Valladao responded that big changes always require an adjustment period.
She added that the new deals aren't going to appeal to everyone, and that customers can always stick with their current packages. "It's not like they're under the gun to change," the CRTC spokeswoman said.
The Consumers' Association of Canada has also been inundated with complaints about the skinny packages — more than 300 at last count.
President Bruce Cran is less sanguine about the flood of unhappy comments.
"We weren't expecting this," he said. "The sort of common theme is that nobody thinks the skinny package is of any great value."
That was March 17th -- just weeks after the mandates skinny packages were first rolled out. It is now November 13th. How do things look for Canada's cable customers, and cable providers, today?
The lure of a $25 basic TV package has not helped stem the tide of Canadians cancelling their cable subscriptions. And critics believe the added pick-and-pay channel options coming next month may not help much either.
Canadians continued to cut the cord in record numbers following the launch of the CRTC-mandated basic TV plans on March 1.
This is according to Mario Mota, with Boon Dog Professional Services, an Ottawa-based research and consulting firm. Mota crunched subscriber numbers for Canada's seven major publicly traded TV providers, including Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw.
He found they lost a combined total of 98,476 TV customers in their first two fiscal quarters during the period of March through September.
That's a loss of 13 per cent more customers than the same period in 2015.
So.... about as I expected, really.
Cable companies decided to play cute with the CRTC's rules, here, making pick-and-pay options so unattractive that people would see them as completely worthless. Well, guess what? It worked. And those people are now opting out of cable subscriptions entirely, just like they said they would.
GG, Canadian cable companies. GG.
Because here's the thing. Those customers, having finally taken the plunge into a cable-free world? They're discovering just how liberating and inexpensive it is to not pay for cable anymore. They're discovering that they like it. They're wondering why they put up with their cable company's bullshit for so long, when there were other, superior, and less expensive options.
The fact that cable companies are grudgingly going to start offering customers what they'd wanted for years is just too little, too late.