CMCR Project Preliminary 2012 Data Release: Concentration Trends in the Broadcast Industries in Canada

Highlights

The CMCR analyzed the financial results for Canada’s biggest TV providers, radio broadcasters, specialty, pay and video-on-demand services as well as cable, satellite TV and IPTV providers released by the CRTC in early April. Our analysis shows that concentration levels in 2012 remained high in all areas, except radio.

Using two standard research tools to assess media concentration – concentration ratios and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) — our analysis shows that:

  1. Concentration levels for all of the industry segments for which the CRTC released data, except radio, remained high in 2012;
  2. However, such levels eased slightly in all segments addressed relative to 2011, except for specialty and pay TV services.

You can access all of our raw data not just for 2012, but from 1984 onwards here (and for questions of methodology and what the concentration ratios and HHI mean, see CMCR’s methodology primer here).

Discussion

Coupled with the annual reports of publicly-traded companies, the CRTC’s 2012 data allows us to construct a fairly comprehensive portrait of the current state of telecom, media and internet concentration in Canada.[1]

While concentration levels remain at the high end of the spectrum according to both the CR and HHI measures, and by international standards, there was a slight uptick in competition in four out of the five areas covered by the CRTC’s data for 2012:

  • In the $3.5 billion conventional TV sector, the CR4 declined from 87% to 83%, while the HHI score dipped slightly from 1966 to 1943. The decline is likely due to the fact that Bell and Shaw saw small declines in their revenues and market share, while two mid-size TV stations that were formerly a part of Canwest have continued to carve out a spot for themselves: the employee-owned CHEK TV in Victoria and Channel Zero’s CHCH in Hamilton.
  • A small dip could also be seen in the $7.5 billion total TV segment (an amalgam of conventional TV with specialty and pay TV), where the market share held by the big four — Bell, Shaw (Corus), Rogers and Quebecor — declined from 79% to 77%, with a corresponding decline in the HHI score as well.
  • Trends for the $8.7 billion cable, DTH and IPTV pointed in a similar direction, with the big four’s share declining modestly from 83 percent to 81 percent, largely due to the growth of Telus, MTS and Sasktel’s IPTV services in western Canada and Bell’s IPTV offering in Ontario and Atlantic provinces.
  • Finally, concentration levels in the $2 billion radio industry continued their long-term downward drift, with the CR4 sliding from 55.5% to 53.4%, at the HHI clearly in the “not a problem” range.

Concentration levels in the $4 billion Pay and Specialty TV services – the fastest growing and most lucrative segment of the TV industry – stayed steady at the high end of the CR4 (81.6%) and HHI (1905) scales. This is likely due to the fact that the growth of newcomers such as Blue Ant and Channel Zero was offset by a rise in Bell’s share of pay and specialty TV services, largely because of the substantial increase in revenue at its English and French-language sports channels, TSN and RDS, respectively.

The preliminary analysis offered thus far is important because the CRTC released the 2012 data in early April, just days after its deadline for submissions regarding BCE’s renewed bid to acquire Astral Media. As a result, none of the interveners was able to include it in their formal, written submissions to the public hearings that took place last week, except for Bell.

Bell filed an updated analysis based on the 2012 data with the CRTC in its Reply to interveners on April 16. In doing so, it used the new data to repeat and buttress its rejection of critics’ claims that the deal gives Bell too much market power:

. . . close review and analysis of the post-divestiture Bell-Astral in each of the English and French television markets – regardless of the metric employed – proves otherwise (Bell Reply, para 46).

Consequently, Bell asserted, there are no barriers from the standpoint of media concentration that should stand in the way of the CRTC approving the deal (Bell Reply, 2013, pp. 4, 11 – 20; also see the report Bell submitted from its consultant, CMI here, Appendix 3, or here). With today’s release of the CMCR data, readers can examine the evidence for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

Regardless of whether you agree with Bell’s view of the world or not, the fact that Bell and nobody else could update the public record for the Bell-Astral hearings using 2012 evidence is deeply troubling. I will have more to say about these issues in a series of upcoming posts. However, as the Commission settles in to make its decision on the Bell-Astral transaction, the public should have as much access as possible to the evidence upon which key elements of the decision will turn.

The CMCR does not just present the relevant data company by company, or on the basis of ‘before’ and ‘after’ snapshots to gauge, for instance, the one-off impact of the Bell-Astral transaction on Bell’s stand-alone share of the TV market. Instead, our analysis of the 2012 data relies on two fundamental tenets of good scholarship on media concentration:

(1)  a long-term focus on concentration trends over a 28-year span from 1984 to 2012;

(2)  using two standard research tools to examine the structure of media markets rather than changes in the stand-alone market shares of individual media firms: Concentration Ratios and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI).

These research methods are essential because snapshots of just one or two media sectors or firms are often selectively used to make unwarranted generalizations about the larger media ecology. Moreover, ‘before’ and ‘after’ snapshots fail to capture dynamic trends over time. These are precisely the kinds of commonly used techniques that serve to muddy the waters, and that sound methodology in media concentration research is explicitly designed to counteract (Noam, 2009, chs. 1-3; IMCR, nd; CMCR, 2012).

Analysis of the 2012 data also reconfirms the existence of a fundamental problem in the CRTC’s data for pay and specialty TV: key aspects of it cannot be reconciled with the results found in the audited annual reports of several companies covered by the Commission’s data sets. Tallying up the CRTC’s data for Astral, for example, yields a figure of $540.9 million, while the company’s Annual Information Form indicates a figure of $562 million, after the revenues from its two conventional TV stations, in-house advertising and online segments are excluded (see p. 8 and PWC, 2012, pp. 45, 52 and PWC, 2013, p. 60).

Nor is the Astral example an anomaly, as I will show in a subsequent post. This is not a view that we reached lightly but only after lengthy discussions with a Commission analyst well acquainted with the Individual Pay, Pay-per view, Video-on-Demand and Specialty Services Financial Summaries being referred to.

We hope readers will find our analysis of the 2012 data helpful in relation to other matters, as well. In the next week we will also release our analysis of the 2012 data for vertical integration between cable, satellite and IPTV distributors (BDUs) and TV and radio broadcasters in English- and French-language markets, and for Canada as a whole.

Our analysis will also be updated as new data becomes available for the remaining telecom, media and internet industries covered by the CMCR project: wireless and wired telecoms, Internet access, search engines, music, newspapers and magazines.


[1] The CRTC released total revenue figures for pay and specialty TV and broadcast distribution services; it did not do so for conventional TV or radio. To estimate revenues for these two sectors, we used last year’s cumulative annual growth rates cited in the Communications Monitoring Report, while checking that figure against other quality sources such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ (2012) Global Entertainment and Media Outlook, 2012 – 2016 to help ensure the reliability of our estimate.