Bell tops TV providers
Company says big part of success due to ‘ people raving about new features’
BCE Inc. announced Wednesday that Bell has become Canada’s largest television provider, clocking more than 2.7 million total subscribers in its third quarter, at a time more consumers of media are streaming or downloading video content on the Internet rather than watching the old- fashioned way.
The Montreal- based telco said in August that it had 2.67 million television subscribers, as of June 30. In April, it had surpassed one million subscribers of Bell’s Fibe TV in Ontario and Quebec and Bell Aliant’s FibreOP, which are two products in a young line that has attracted users as its satellite division has been shedding them and cable rivals have been a bit slower to update the look and feel of their set- top boxes.
Shaw Communications Inc. has 2.69 million television subscribers, Rogers Communications Inc. has 1.9 million and telco Telus Corp. has 954,000, according to the latest figures published in quarterly reports. BCE and Telus are slated to release both of their results for the third quarter on Thursday.
“Cable TV has been around since the 1970s but innovation in television has been kind of slow,” Rizwan Jamal, who runs Bell’s residential services unit, said during a phone interview.
“When you look at Fibe TV and what we’ve done over the last five years since we launched, you can see a renewed innovation in television viewing. People are raving about our new features, and that’s been a big part of our success.”
Some of these new features include: “Restart,” which lets viewers to start a show that’s in progress from the beginning or allows viewers to go back in time up to 30 hours; “Resume,” which lets viewers change the channel while replaying a show and return to that after changing it back; “Trending,” which lists the five most- watched shows at any time in English and French; and a new mobile app, which allows users to watch select channels on their mobile device instead of being handcuffed to the big screen television.
Bell has added these features to a basic platform that is built by Ericsson. Jamal says that the platform is also being used in Canada by Telus, SaskTel and Manitoba Telecom Services Inc.
“Generally speaking, they can be duplicated,” Jamal added, referring to the technology features that can he says differentiate this service.
“But, at the same time, we tend to be at the frontier of bringing these solutions to market.”