New TV, streaming offerings eyed to help stem piracy

TORONTO — Products like new streaming TV services and sports-focused TV-everywhere offerings will help the industry curb piracy, according to Stewart Johnston, president of BCE Inc.’s Bell Media studios and TSN. Speaking at the Canadian Telecom Summit Tuesday, Johnston said piracy presents a “significant problem,” though not one that’s possible to quantify just yet. “What we need to do as an industry is to continue to make our products as accessible as possible to all Canadians, to try and help stem that urge, that need, that tendency to find it elsewhere,” he said. Johnston noted that the cost of sports content has increased, “and as that cost has gone up, we need to drive revenue to help cover those costs, and if we haven’t tapped into every revenue stream possible, we have failed.” That solution includes offering products like authenticated TV-everywhere sports streaming services that allow people to access content outside of the home, he said. Taking down individual websites isn’t an effective strategy. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole,” he said. Last year, Bell teamed up with Quebecor Inc.’s TVA to shut down an illegal sports streaming website. Instead, the long-term strategy needs to be to educate the public that “this is actually theft,” he said. “Our parent company at Bell, they launched AltTV earlier, other BDUs have launched this year as well as some really progressive products that are going to help keep consumers within the ecosystem and maybe help shield us as an industry from that kind of piracy,” he added. Johnston said one challenge when it comes to appealing to a younger demographic is fragmentation, as users have more options than every before. “We need them to spend longer watching our content,” he said. “And that’s difficult because all the other options are out there. We know that younger demographic has a second screen in their hand, and they are following social media trends. They can get distracted pretty easily.” One way sports properties specifically can take measures to appeal to that audience is by providing sports highlights, which younger audiences are a fan of, he said. Johnston said he believes that with time, younger people will watch more television, giving the example that young people aged 25 to 35 watch 1.5 more hours a week of television than their younger counterparts. “Really, it’s a change of lifestyle, as you grow. So I think we can count on that to continue.” But Heather Conway, executive vice-president of English services at CBC/Radio-Canada, expressed a different point of view while speaking earlier that morning. She said that as younger people age, they’re not necessarily going to change their behaviour from more interactive engagement, such as second screens while watching, to a more traditional “passive” TV experience. “Which is what we always thought in the TV business, was ‘yeah, yeah, young people use digital and then they have kids and then they they’ll start to watch HGTV and then it’ll be all good’,” she said. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca

New TV, streaming offerings eyed to help stem piracy

Broadcast | June 6, 2017

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New TV, streaming offerings eyed to help stem piracy

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