Consumers win as competition between Shaw, Telus heats up
The installer was at Michael Olivotto’s Vancouver apartment this week, putting in a new television service.
Olivotto chose Optik TV, a new Internet-based television service from Teluscorp., over the cable TV market’s dominant western Canadian player, Shaw Communications Inc.
“I’ve got a couple of friends that have the new Telus TV. I’ve seen it on their TVS and it’s by far, the best user interface, the most intuitive,” Olivotto said. Every day, at least 500 people in British Columbia and Alberta make the same choice as Olivotto.
It’s a trend that has fundamentally changed the competitive relationship between Western Canada’s telecom giants Telus and Shaw, and for the customers they’re battling to woo.
You could say the fight nominally began a decade ago, when Vancouver-based Telus launched an Internet service to compete with Shaw, and by 2011, grew to 1.2 million subscribers, from 26,000. Things got serious five years ago when Calgary-based Shaw launched a home phone service and lev- eraged its traditional role as a cable TV service provider to steal — at last count — 897,000 home phone customers from Telus in B.C. and Alberta.
Telus has offered TV service since 2005, but didn’t get truly aggressive about it until June 2010 when its ongoing program of infrastructure upgrades ($22 billion in wire and wireless networks in 10 years), the development of a more competitive tv package, and customer service centre expansions converged into an opportunity to expand its brand.
In its most recent quarterly report Telus announced that its Optik subscriber base has grown to 450,000.