The Growth of the Network Media Economy in Canada, 1984 – 2011
(reposted from Dwayne Winseck’s blog Mediamorphis)
Has the media economy in Canada become bigger or smaller over time? Does the answer, one way or another, apply to the media economy as a whole, to most sectors that make up the network media economy, or to just a few: wiredline & wireless telecoms; broadcast TV; subscription and pay TV; cable, satellite & IPTV distribution; newspapers; magazines; radio; music; Internet access and internet advertising?
Which sectors of the network media are growing, which are stagnating and which are in decline? These are the questions addressed by this post. Along the way, I will hone in on rising new media services (IPTV) and others that appear to be in long-term decline (newspapers). I will also examine whether the media economy in Canada is big or small relative to global standards.
The post kicks-off a three part series that I’ll unfold over the next few weeks. It’s aim is to set down a baseline of data and understanding to address the next two posts in the trilogy.
Similar to what I did last year, the next post will examine telecom, media and internet (TMI) concentration, while the third will look at who owns the leading telecom-media-internet TMI companies in Canada. The overall goal is to offer a rich, empirically and theoretically-grounded, and historically informed portrait of the development and current trends in the network media economy over the period from 1984 until 2011.
Canada’s Network Media Economy in a Global Context
While often cast as a dwarf amongst giants, the network media economy in Canada is now the ninth largest in the world, with revenues of just over $35 billion in 2011 (excluding wired and wireless telecoms). It has grown comparatively fast relative to other developed capitalist economies and big media economies elsewhere in the world. The overview of the twelve largest national media economies worldwide in Table 1 below illustrates the point.
Table 1: Canada’s Ranking Amongst 12 Biggest Network Media, Entertainment and Internet Markets by Country, 2000 – 2011 (millions USD) [i]
Canada’s network media economy is obviously small relative to the U.S., at one-tenth the size. However, relative to the rest of the world, it is amongst the ten biggest media economies, right after Brazil and just before Australia, South Korea and Spain.
The network media economy in Canada, like those in Germany, the UK, and Australia, largely stagnated for two years during the economic downtown that followed quick on the heels of the Anglo European financial crisis (2007ff), but for the most part things have turned around since 2010 in these countries. Conditions have been considerably worse in the U.S., Japan, Italy and Spain, with media economies actually shrinking before once again picking up in 2010, except in Japan and Spain. Overall, and by comparative standards, the network media economy in Canada has fared well during the economic downturn years.
In sharp contrast to much of Europe and North America, the media economies of China, Brazil and South Korea continued to grow at a fast pace. Indeed, the media economies in these countries and a few others such as Turkey and Russia have been going through something of a ‘golden media age’, with most media, from internet access, to the press, television, film and so on undergoing an unprecedented and extended period of fast-paced development (OECD, 2010).
The Network Media Economy in Canada: Growth, Stagnation or Decline?
Turning our attention solely to Canada, the figure below shows that the network media economy has grown enormously over the past few decades, from $19.4 billion in 1984 to nearly $71 billion in 2011 (current $). In other words, the network media economy has more than tripled in size during the last quarter-of-a-century. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the network media economy grew from $37.5 billion in 1984 to just under $70 billion last year (2010$). The figure below charts the trends (you can access the underlying data sets by clicking on the Media Industry Data tab at the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project).
Figure 1: The Growth of the Network Media Economy in Canada, 1984 – 2011 (Mill$ unadjusted for inflation)
Sources: see the CMCR Project’s methodology primary.
The vast expansion of the media economy has been driven by the addition of new media – wireless, internet access, pay and specialty tv services, internet advertising. The most significant source of growth is from the network connectivity elements (e.g. wireless, ISPs, IPTV, cable and satellite), especially after the mid-1990s.
The Network Connectivity Segments
The connectivity segments – the pipes, bandwidth and spectrum used to connect people to one another and to devices, content, the internet, and so forth — grew from $13.9 billion to $51.5 billion between 1984 and 2011. In real dollar terms, revenue grew from $26.8 billion to $50.5 billion. The following table shows the trends.
Table 2: Revenues for the Network Connectivity Industries, 1984 – 2011 (mill$)
Accounting for just under three-quarters of revenues across the media economy as a whole, the network connectivity sectors are the real fulcrum of the media economy in Canada, as is the case generally in most of the world. This is why Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Quebecor, Telus, SaskTel, MTS Allstream, Eastlink, Cogeco, etc. are so central to the media economy, to say nothing of the holdings that the biggest among them have in the media content sectors of the network media ecology.
While some might think that the over-sized weight of network and connectivity in the media economy is of recent vintage given the growth of wireless, the internet, IPTV, DTH, and so on in recent years, this is not true. In fact, despite the addition of all of these new areas, the connectivity sectors’ share of the network media economy in 2011 was not even two percentage points more than twenty-seven years ago: 72.8 percent versus 71.2 percent, albeit within the context of a vastly larger media economy.
Why? One reason is TV, which is still very much at the centre of the network media universe (see below).
Not all network connectivity segments have grown and this is especially true of plain old wiredline telephone services. Wiredline telecom revenues peaked in 2000 at $21.2 billion and have fallen steadily ever since to reach $16.4 billion in 2011. The decline, as both figure 1 and the data in Table 2 above show, has been steep and unrelenting.
As plain old telephone services (POTS) has gone into decline, however, some pretty awesome new stuff (PANS) has come along to more than pick up the slack. The best example is wireless cell phone services. Wireless revenues were $19.3 billion in 2011 – three-and-a-half times revenues at the beginning of the decade ($5.4 billion), and up significantly from $18 billion in 2010 and $16.2 billion in 2008. Unlike a few other areas (see below), wireless revenues did not suffer from the economic downtown either after the collapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000 or in the face of the Anglo-European financial crisis (2007ff).
Internet access displays similar patterns but for not as long or to the same extent. Internet access revenues last year were $7.2 billion, up substantially from $6.2 billion in 2008 and quadruple what they were at the turn-of-the-21st century ($1.8 billion).
The most notable development over the past year is the growth of the telephone companies’ Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) services. IPTV is essentially the incumbent telcos’ managed internet-based tv services: e.g. Telus, Bell, MTS Allstream, SaskTel, and Bell Aliant.
IPTV services are often seen as important because the entry of the telcos into television distribution promises more competition for incumbent cable companies and because IPTV is often associated with efforts to bring next generation, fiber-based internet networks closer to subscribers, either to their doorstep or nearby neighbourhood nodes. If the distribution of television is essential to the take-up of next generation networks, as I believe it is, then IPTV will be part of the demand drivers for these networks.
According to the CRTC, IPTV revenues were $322.3 million in 2011, up greatly from $207.8 million a year earlier and triple the amount of 2008. The CRTC also states that there were 657,300 IPTV subscribers in 2011 versus 416,900 in 2010 and 225,000 in 2008. By any standard, this would appear to be impressive growth.
These numbers, however, still seem low. For example, published data from Telus, MTS Allstream, SaskTel, and Bell Aliant show that they have substantially more subscribers than the CRTC identifies (775,000 vs 657,300), and this is without including Bell. Add another estimated 128,000 subscribers for Bell’s Montreal and Toronto-centric IPTV service and the number of subscribers rises to approximately 903,000. Table 3 below shows the trends in terms of subscribers.
Table 3: The Growth of IPTV Subscribers in Canada, 2004 – 2011[ii]
2004 | 2006 | 2008 | 2010 | 2011 | |
Bell Fibe TV (1) | 83,000 | 127,644 | |||
Bell Aliant (2) | 49,000 | 77,000 | |||
Telus (3) | 78,000 | 314,000 | 509,000 | ||
MTS Allstream (4) | 32,578 | 66,093 | 84,544 | 89,967 | 95,476 |
SaskTel (5) | 25800 | 51277 | 70463 | 85537 | 93,960 |
Total IPTV Connections | 58,378.0 | 117,370 | 233,007 | 621,504 | 903,080 |
I explain some reasons for this large discrepancy in the endnote to Table 3 and will write another post to examine the issues more thoroughly. For now, however, I want to note that, not surprisingly, given that my estimate for subscribers is much higher than the CRTC’s, that my estimate for IPTV revenues is also much higher than the figure the Commission states. I estimate that IPTV revenues in 2011 were $650.6 million — more than four times the amount in 2008 ($142.7 million) — and up greatly from $423 million the previous year. Table 3 below illustrates the trends.
Table 4: The Growth of IPTV Revenues in Canada, 2004 – 2011 (mill$)[iii]
2004 | 2006 | 2008 | 2010 | 2011 | |
Bell Fibe TV (1) | 60.2 | 91.0 | |||
Bell Aliant (2) | 33.6 | 54.9 | |||
Telus (3) | 50.1 | 215.3 | 364.8 | ||
MTS Allstream (4) | 10.8 | 32.2 | 50.6 | 59.0 | 71.5 |
SaskTel (5) | 8.6 | 25 | 42 | 55.1 | 70.3 |
19.4 | 57.2 | 142.7 | 423.2 | 650.6 |
The growth of the IPTV services is significant for many reasons. First, it suggests that the telcos are finally making the investments needed to bring fiber networks closer to their subscribers, at least on a large enough scale that their efforts can be measured, despite being hemmed in by opaque reporting measures in some cases (Bell Aliant, Telus) and a complete lack of disclosure in others (Bell).
Second, the addition of IPTV as a new television distribution platform expands the size of the “BDU sector” (cable, satellite and IPTV), while bringing the telcos deeper into the cable companies’ dominion. By 2011, IPTV services accounted for 7.6 percent of the TV distribution market, based on my numbers, or 3.8 percent using CRTC data. I’ll address whether or not this has significantly increased competition and lessened concentration in the next post.
While IPTV services finally appear to be taking off, we must remember several things. First, it has been the small prairie telcos, followed by Telus, which have taken the lead in deploying IPTV. For Sasktel, Telus and MTSAllstream, IPTV revenues now make up a significant 11.9 percent, 8.5 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively, of their revenues from fixed network access services (Wiredline + ISP + Cable).
Bell lags far behind, with only 1.4 percent of its revenues coming from IPTV services, including Bell Aliant, in 2011. Indeed, Bell only launched IPTV via its affiliate Bell Aliant in 2009, before targeting high-end districts of Montreal and Toronto the next year, half-a-decade after MTS Allstream and SaskTel began doing so in the prairies.
In other words, innovation and investment is coming from small telcos on the margins and Telus, not Bell. This replays a long-standing practice in telecoms for new services to start out as luxuries for the rich and well-to-do before a mixture of public, political and competitive pressures turn them into affordable and available necessities for the masses. From the telegraph to fiber-based next generation Internet, the tendencies, conflicts and lessons have remained much the same.
Generally speaking, IPTV remains under-developed as a critical part of the network infrastructure in Canada, accounting for only 2 percent of the $32.2 billion in fixed network access revenues (see Table 2). OECD data confirm the point, with Canada ranked 20 out of 29 countries in terms of fiber-based connections to the premises as a proportion of all broadband connections available.
In Canada, just over one percent of broadband connections use fiber, while the OECD average is 10 percent (similar to levels at Sasktel and Telus). In many ways, the poor performance of Bell over the past half-decade has dragged Canada down in the global league tables as a whole. In countries at the high end of the scale (Sweden, Slovak Rep., Korea, Japan), thirty to sixty-plus percent of all broadband connections are fiber-based. The following figure illustrates the point.
Source: OECD (2011a). Broadband Portal. www.oecd.org/…/0,3746,en_2649_34225_38690102_1_1_1_1,00.html.
The Network Content Industries
In the remainder of this post I will turn my attention to the network content industries(broadcast tv, pay and specialty tv, radio, newspapers, magazines, music and internet advertising). For the most part, they too have grown substantially, although the picture has become more mixed than in the network connectivity sectors in the past few years.
In 1984, total revenue for the content industries was $5.6 billion; it was $19 billion in 2011. The growth overall appears to have been steady throughout this period, with no discernible major uptick or downturn at any given point in time. Table 4, below, depicts the trends.
Table 4: Revenues for the Content Industries, 1984 – 2011 (mill$)
Despite much hand-wringing to the contrary, television remains at the very centre of the increasingly internet-centric media environment. Indeed, this is true of all three of the main components of the television industries: conventional broadcast tv, specialty and pay tv services as well as the cable, satellite and IPTV services that underpin TV distribution for the vast majority of Canadians.
Since the onset of the economic slow down after the Anglo European financial crisis, many have argued that conventional television has been in a death spiral as advertising revenues dry up and shift to the internet. Indeed, the dreaded “TV tax” (local programming improvement fund, or LPIF) was put into place by the CRTC in 2008 precisely on the basis of such arguments, before being rescinded by rescinded by the regulator in 2012 and to be phased out completely by 2014. The rise of over-the-top services such as Netflix only further compounded the woes, so the story went.
Yet, a closer look at the evidence suggests that neither claim holds much value. To be sure, revenues for broadcast television did decline between 2008 and 2009, but only modestly, and were quickly restored and on the rise again by 2010. In 2008, broadcast TV revenues were roughly $3,381.4 million (including the CBC annual appropriation). They fell in 2009, but by 2010 had risen to $3,405.6 million and to just under $3,500 million last year.
Tightening the analysis by basing it solely on inflation-adjusted dollars changes the picture somewhat, but only slightly. Seen from this angle, broadcast television revenues were roughly $3.454.7 million in 2000, peaked at $3,518 million in 2005 and have drifted down slightly since, where they have stayed fairly steady around $3,400 million since 2008.
Small decline? Yes. But a calamity? Hardly.
That the TV in crises choir is wide of the mark becomes even clearer once we widen the lens to look at the fastest growing areas of television: i.e. specialty and pay tv services (HBO, TSN, Comedy Central, etc.) and television distribution. In terms of specialty and pay television services, these have been fast growing segments since the mid-1990s and especially so over the past decade. Specialty and pay-tv services eclipsed conventional broadcasting as the largest piece of the TV pie in 2010, when revenues reached $3,459.4 million. Last year, that figure grew to $3,732.1 million.
Adding both conventional as well as specialty and pay tv services together to get a sense of ‘total television’ revenues as a whole yields an unmistakable picture: with revenues of $7,224 million in 2011, television is not dead or dying. It is thriving.
TV remains at the centre of the internet-centric media universe and is growing fast. In fact, Total TV revenues quadrupled from $1.8 billion in 1984 to $7.2 billion in 2007; using ‘real dollars’, total TV revenues doubled from $3.5 billion in 1984 to just over $7 billion last year — hardly the image of a media sector in crisis.
Add to this, cable, satellite and IPTV distribution and the trend is more undeniable. In these domains, as indicated earlier, the addition of new services, first DTH in the 1990s, followed recently by IPTV, and steady growth in cable TV, means that TV distribution has grown immensely, in essence expanding ten-fold from revenues of $716.3 million in 1984 to $8,588.3 million in 2011 (in current dollars).
Altogether, adding “Total TV” and TV distribution revenues together, these segments of the network media industries accounted for just over $15.8 billion in 2011. As a matter of fact, the weight of all television segments in the network media economy has risen considerably over time, from accounting for 13.2 percent of all revenues in 1984, to 18.4 percent in 2000 and to 22.3 percent in 2011.
Of course, this does not mean that that life is easy for those in the television industries. Indeed, all of these sectors continue to have to come to terms with an environment that is becoming structurally more differentiated because of new media, notably IPTV and over-the-top (OTT) services such as Netflix, as well as significant changes in how people use the multiplying media at their disposal.
While incumbent television providers have leaned heavily on the CRTC and Parliament to change the rules to bring OTT services into the regulatory fold, or to weaken the rules governing their own services (see Bell’s submission in its bid to take over Astral Media, for a recent example), OTT services are still minor fixtures in the media economy. For example, based on roughly 1.2 million subscribers , Netflix’s annual revenues were an estimated $115 million in 2011 – about 1.6 percent of “Total TV” revenues. Recent reports by Media Technology Monitor and the CBC as well as the CRTC’s (2011) Results of the Fact Finding Exercise on Over-the-Top Programming Services lead to a similar conclusion.
Part of the more structurally differentiated network media economy is also illustrated by the rapid growth of internet advertising. In 2011, internet advertising revenue grew to $2.6 billion, up from just over $2.2 billion a year earlier and $1.6 billion in 2008. At the beginning of the decade, internet advertising accounted for a comparably paltry $110 million, but has shot upwards since to reach current levels, demonstrating both fast growth as well as the fact that, like wireless services, internet advertising has not been significantly affected by downturns in the general economy.
To be sure, these trends have given rise to important new actors on the media scene in Canada, notably Google and Facebook, among others, who account for the lion’s share of internet advertising revenues. Indeed, based on common estimates of Google’s share of internet advertising revenues, the internet giant’s revenues in Canada in 2011 were in the neighbourhood of $1,300 million. This is indeed significant, enough to rank Google as the eighth largest media company operating in Canada by revenues, just after the CBC and SaskTel but ahead of Postmedia and MTS Allstream.
For its part, Facebook had an estimated 17.1 million users in Canada at the end of 2011. Based on estimated revenues of $9.51 per user, Facebook’s advertising revenue can be estimated at $162.6 million in 2011, or 6.3% of online advertising revenue – an amount that give it a modest place in the media economy in Canada but which would not put it even close to being on the list of the top twenty or so TMI companies in this country.
While it is commonplace to throw digital media giants into the mix of woes that are, erroneously, trotted out as bedeviling many of the traditional media such as television in Canada, the fact of the matter is that Netflix’s impact on television revenues is negligible, while those of Google and Facebook are mostly irrelevant.
Where they may be more important, however, is in three other areas where the portrait is not so rosy: music, magazines and newspapers. With respect to music, it is not advertising that is at issue, but rather the manner in which online digital distribution, legal and illicit, as well the culture of linking is affecting the music industry. At some point I will write a full-length post on each of these sectors, but for now a simple sketch will have to do.
Music
While many have held up the music industry as a poster child of the woes besetting ‘traditional media’ at the hands of digital media, the music industry in Canada is not in crisis, although the picture is mixed. Using current dollars, the sum of all of the main components of the music industry – recorded music, digital sales, concerts and publishing royalties – the music industry grew from $1,181.9 million in 2000 to a high of $1,373.7 in 2008.
Music industry revenues across these four segments have generally stayed remarkably steady around the 2008 level, up to and including 2011, when revenues were $1357.7 million. There is no crisis.
The picture is a little more troubling, however, when we switch the metric to ‘real dollars’, which results in revenues reaching a high of $1.5 billion in 2004 and a decline from there to $1.316 billion last year — a significant decline, yes, but not a calamity, and with the trend clearly towards a floor being in place below which further declines in the future will be unlikely or very modest.
Radio
Radio stands in much the same position as the music industries. Revenues continued to grow until reaching a peak in 2008 of $1,990 (including CBC annual appropriation), a level at which they have stayed relatively flat since, with revenues of $1,949.5 in 2011 (current dollars). Change the measurement from current dollars to inflation-adjusted, real dollars, however, and the picture changes slightly, with a gradual decline from just over $2 billion in 2008 to roughly $1.9 billion in 2011.
Magazines
Magazines appear to stand in the same position as the music and radio sectors as well, although I have not been able to update my revenue data for the sector for 2011. Yet, extrapolating from trends between 2008 and 2010 to obtain an estimate for 2011, revenues have declined slightly on the basis of current dollars (from 2,394 million in 2008 to $2,135 in 2011). The drop is more pronounced when using real dollars, with a significant drop of about sixteen percent from $2,457.8 million in 2008 to $2,071.1 last year.
Newspapers
Perhaps the most dramatic tale of doom and gloom within the network media economy, at least in terms of revenues, is from the experience of newspapers. Readers of this blog will know that in earlier versions of the “Network Media Economy in Canada” post, and other posts, I have been skeptical of claims that journalism is in crisis. I still am, and believe, much along the lines of scholars such as Yochai Benkler, that we are in a period of heightened flux, but with the emergence of new commercial internet-based members of the press (the Tyee and Huffington Post, for example), the revival of the partisan press (e.g. Blogging Tories, Rabble.ca) as well as non-profits and cooperatives (e.g. the Dominion) and the rise of an important role for citizen journalists indicating that journalism is not moribund or necessarily in a death spiral. In fact, these changes may herald a huge opportunity to improve the conditions of a free and responsible press.
At the same time, however, I also believe that traditional newspapers, whether the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star or Ottawa Citizen are important engines in the overall network media economy, serving as the content factories that produce news, opinion, gossip and cultural style markers that have the ability to set the agenda and whose stories cascade across the media as a whole in a way that is all out of proportion to the weight of the press in the media economy. In other words, the press still originates far more stories and attention that the rest of the media pick up, whether television or via the linking culture of the blogosphere, than their weight suggests. Thus, problems in the press could pose significant problems for the media, citizens and audiences as a whole.
While I have been reluctant to see newspapers as being in crisis, mostly because in previous years I have felt that the trends had not been long enough in the making to draw that conclusion, and also because I think many of the wounds being suffered by the newspaper business, have been self-inflicted out of a mixture of hubris and badly conceived bouts of consolidation, I’m now ready to change my tune when it comes to the state of newspaper revenues.
Newspaper revenues have plummeted. In current dollar terms, newspaper revenues peaked in the years between 2000 and 2006 at between $5.5 and $5.7 billion. They have fallen substantially since to just under $4 billion last year – a decline of 30 percent or so. Indeed, revenues fell by 9 percent just between 2010 and 2011.
In real dollar terms, the fall is more pronounced yet. Newspaper revenues, on the basis of this measure, shrunk by about $1.7 billion – or almost a third (30.7 percent) – in the five-year period between 2006 and 2011. This is the most clear cut case of a medium in decline out of the ten sectors of the network media economy reviewed in this post.
Some Concluding Comments and Observations
Several observations and conclusions stand out from the preceding analysis. First, the network media economy has grown significantly over time, whether we look at things in the short-, medium- or long-term.
Second, while the network media economy in Canada may be small relative to the U.S., it is large relative to global standards. In fact, it is the ninth biggest media economy in the world.
Third, while most sectors of the media have grown substantially, and the network media economy has become structurally more differentiated and complex on account of the rise of new segments of the media, a few segments have stagnated in the past few years (music, radio, magazines). It is also now safe to say that two sectors appear to be in long-term decline: the traditional newspaper industry and wiredline telecoms.
The next and last table of this post gives a snapshot of the state of affairs across the network media economy as things stood at the end 2011 by placing each of the sectors covered in this post in one of three categories: growth, stagnation and decline.
Table 5: The Network Media in Canada: Sectors Experiencing Growth, Stagnation or Decline
Growth | Stagnation | Decline |
Wireless Telecoms | Broadcast TV | Wiredline Telecoms |
Internet Access | Music | Newspapers |
Cable & Satellite | Radio | |
IPTV | Magazines. | |
Pay & Specialty TV | ||
Internet Advertising |
[i] Sources: PWC (2012), Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for all countries and for all segments, except the subcomponents of publishing rights and live concerts for the music sector, which is based on IDATE DigiWorld Yearbook 2009. I have excluded video games, book publishing, and business-to-business sectors from the PWC figures to make the country profiles correspond to the definition of the network media economy in Canada used here and by the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project. Canadian sources as listed in the CMCR project’s methodology primary, but generally based on the CRTC’s Communications Monitoring Report as well as Statistics Canada’s Cansim tables and publications for the sectors that make up the network media economy.
[ii] I use BDU ARPU because the CRTC’s estimate for IPTV ARPU of $40.86 appears too low alongside its estimates for BDUs ($59.41). with which IPTV services compete, as well as figures published by MTS Allstream in its Annual Reports that set their IPTV ARPU at $62.38.Sources: (1) Bell’s revenues are based on the CRTC’s Aggregate Annual Return. Dividing this number by the CRTC’s annual ARPU estimates for BDUs of $59.41/month in the 2011Communications Monitoring Report (p. 96) yields 127.6 thousand subscribers for 2011. (2) Bell Aliant’s subscriber numbers are from its Annual Report (p. 2). Revenue figures arrived at by multiplying subscriber numbers by ARPU estimates for BDUs ($59.41/month in 2011) stated in the CRTC’s 2011 Communications Monitoring Report (p. 96); (3) Telus‘ subscriber numbers are from its 2011 Annual Report (p. 10) and 2010 Annual Report (p. 5). Revenue figures arrived at through same method as above. This number probably inflates the Telus figures slightly because it includes the company’s DTH satellite TV service that it resells for Bell, but Telus officials I have spoken to assure me that true IPTV subscribers are the vast majority; (4) MTS Allstream’s subscriber and ARPU figures from its 2011 Annual Report (pp. 3, 16) and multiplied by an ARPU of $62.38, as per its Annual Report. Its 2008 Annual Report lists subscriber numbers from 2004 (p. 62); (5) Sasktel’s data from its 2011 Annual Report (pp. 14, 29). Previous years from 2010 Annual Report (p. 45) and 2006 Annual Report(p. 49). SaskTel ubscriber numbers, except for 2008, are multiplied by MTS ARPU to arrive at total revenues because SaskTel does not present revenue figures for its IPTV service on a stand-alone basis and because MTS is most comparable to SaskTel vs CRTC’s average ARPU. Note: SaskTel revenue figures for this table revised on November 19th.
[iii] Ibid.