Multichannel television in Canada
is served by various multichannel television services, including cable television systems, two direct-broadcast satellite providers, and various other wireline IPTV and wireless MMDS video providers.
Canadian multichannel television providers are legally referred to as broadcast distribution undertakings. They must be licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and comply with its policies, including those on the packaging of their services. Additionally, the CRTC licences specialty channels; licensing was previously mandatory for all services, and restrictions were placed on their content in order to discourage direct competition in certain categories. The CRTC began to phase out these policies by the 2010s, and in 2012, it began exempting networks with less than 200,000 subscribers, as well as certain ethnic services not broadcasting in Canada's official or indigenous languages, from formal licensing. Per its New Media exemption order, the CRTC does not regulate internet television or video content delivered over the public internet, such as over-the-top subscription services.
Some of the CRTC's policies in regard to multichannel television are intended to protect and encourage the production of Canadian content, and prevent foreign broadcasters from unduly harming domestic outlets. U.S. and international channels can be authorized for distribution in Canada if they are deemed to not be unduly competitive to Canadian outlets. Affiliates of the U.S. ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and PBS networks are also readily available in Canada, but their programming is subject to a CRTC rule known as simultaneous substitution, which gives Canadian broadcast stations within a viewer's market the right to require that U.S. feeds of programs be substituted by BDUs with their own if they are broadcasting the same program in simulcast. This rule serves to protect Canadian advertising revenue.
The majority of Canada's multichannel television industry is dominated by vertically integrated companies and their respective services, including Bell Canada's Bell Satellite TV satellite and fibreoptic Fibe TV IPTV services, Rogers Communications' cable systems, Shaw Communications' cable systems, Telus' Optik TV and Vidéotron.
Platforms
Cable television
History
In 1949, the Broadcast Relay Service began negotiations for the implementation of what was to be the first large scale cable television system in North America. The development of the system relied on reaching an agreement with the Quebec Hydro-Electric Commission to utilise their existing network of power poles supplying power to the Montreal metropolitan area. Initial discussions began with a meeting with the Montreal City Council on June 21, 1949. After many months of negotiation, an agreement was reached between Hydro Quebec and Rediffusion Inc. on February 28, 1950 for an initial five-year period. The Rediffusion cable system began operation in 1952, and eventually supplied 80,000 homes in Montreal, Quebec.Cable television in Canada began in 1952 with community antenna connections in Vancouver and London; as to which city was first to launch such a service is not clear. Initially, the systems brought American stations to viewers in Canada who had no Canadian stations to watch; broadcast television, though begun late in 1952 in Toronto and Montreal, did not reach a majority of cities until 1954.
In time, cable television was widely established to carry available Canadian stations as well as import American stations, which constituted the vast majority of signals on systems. During the 1970s, a growing number of Canadian stations pushed American channels off the systems, forcing several to expand beyond the original 12-channel system configurations. At the same time, the advent of fibre-optic technology enabled companies to extend their systems to nearby towns and villages that by themselves were not viable cable television markets. In 1977-78, regional cable services such Telecable and Cable Regina in Saskatchewan began to emerge, offering access to American networks for the first time, though a third system, CPN, which offered specialty channels such as HBO, failed after two years.
Specialty television channels available only on cable began to be established in 1983, and systems continued to expand and upgrade their channel capacity, notably by deploying fibre-optics to carry signals as far as neighbourhoods before converting to coaxial cable for the final run to the customer premises. The use of fibre optic cables as far back as the 1970s does not imply that cable companies were using digital methods to transmit signals as is sometimes assumed by the modern viewer, this is a common misunderstanding. Methods were developed and deployed as far back as the 1970s to transmit analog video using frequency division multiplexing via fibre-optic cabling. Digital signaling is a much more modern practice which only began in the early 2000s. Two-way capabilities were introduced, and larger systems were able to use "addressable" descramblers to offer pay television services and different tiers of channels.
Cable television began to face serious competition from DTH satellite services in the late 1990s. Telephone companies and cable television providers have since been permitted, in most parts of Canada, to compete to provide services originally provided by the other. Cable television services are not the prime providers of broadband Internet in Canada, but they are a very strong competitor for the service.
During the early 1970s, Canadian television stations obtained regulatory rulings that required cable television operators to substitute their signals for distant stations carrying the same television program at the same time. This was to protect the stations' advertising sales.
Many systems were originally locally owned, and many large cities had several providers each covering specific sections of a city; sometimes these territories were established by a "gentleman's agreement" between system owners. Hamilton, Ontario, had six different operators. London had two, with a very convoluted dividing line in the old south neighbourhood; Rogers eventually bought the companies that ran those two systems, merging them, a pattern repeated elsewhere. Even before mergers, companies in the same community collaborated to operate the community channel.
A long series of consolidations and acquisitions rapidly brought most major cities' systems under the ownership of a small number of large companies. Some of the largest companies even applied for regulator permission to swap systems in order to consolidate their operations: Shaw sold systems in eastern Canada to Rogers, buying Rogers systems in western Canada.
Presently, cable is provided to most cities and towns, depending on the region, by companies such as Rogers, Shaw, Vidéotron, Cogeco, Cable Axion, and EastLink. Most of these "first-generation" cable companies do not compete with each other, as the CRTC has traditionally licensed only one cable provider per market. Even in markets where more than one distributor has been licensed, each has an exclusive territory within the market.
IPTV
In the early 2000s, IPTV services began to emerge in some markets as an alternative to digital cable. IPTV service is typically delivered over a private, Internet Protocol network using a phone company's copper or fibre to the home infrastructure, and offers a similar user experience and features to a digital cable service.IPTV has seen wide adoption in Western Canada; Saskatchewan's government-owned telecom SaskTel was the first provider in Canada to launch an IPTV service, followed by Manitoba Telecom Services in 2004, and later Telus in Alberta and British Columbia. Bell Canada has offered IPTV, first in Atlantic Canada, and later in metropolitan Ontario and Quebec, and Manitoba, under the Bell Fibe TV brand. IPTV services have also been launched by smaller regional providers such as Vmedia.
Cable providers such as Rogers and Cogeco have also been phasing out traditional digital cable in favour of IPTV-based services delivered over their cable Internet networks,
Satellite television
In Canada, the two legal DBS services available are Bell Satellite TV and Shaw Direct. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has refused to license American satellite services, but nonetheless hundreds of thousands of Canadians access or have accessed American services – usually these services have to be billed to an American address and are paid for in U.S. dollars, although many viewers receive American signals through pirate decryption. Whether such activity is grey market or black market is the source of often heated debate between those who would like greater choice and those who argue that the protection of Canadian firms and Canadian culture is more important.Canadian satellite providers continue to be plagued by the unquestionably black market devices which "pirate" or "steal" their signals as well as by a number of otherwise completely lawful devices which can be reprogrammed to receive pirated television signals.
Karl Péladeau, CEO of Québecor is on public record as demanding conditions be placed on the CRTC licence issued to Bell Satellite TV, due to Bell TV’s reputation for vastly inferior security compared to its cable rivals and Shaw Cable-owned Shaw Direct.
Although there are no official statistics, the use of American satellite services in Canada appears to be declining as of 2004.
Some would claim that this is probably due to a combination of increasingly aggressive police enforcement and an unfavourable exchange rate between the Canadian and U.S. currencies. As the U.S. dollar has been declining as of 2005 versus other international currencies, the decline in DirecTV viewership in Canada may well be related not to a cost difference as much as to the series of smart card swaps which have rendered the first three generations of DirecTV access cards all obsolete.