Canadians add online services to traditional TV
MONTREAL — For Jeff Taylor, the monthly cost of having Netflix is akin to what he spends at the coffee shop every couple of days.
Taylor subscribes to the online TV service in addition to his cable TV package, making him one of a growing number of Canadians paying for both traditional and at least one online TV service, says Deloitte Canada in its 2014 tech predictions.
Taylor hasn’t cut his cable package because he likes some of the TV specialty channels, such as the Food Network and live sports.
But he likes Netflix, too, because it’s handy for his children and he can “blow through” 10 seasons of a show in week.
“I never liked the Sunday-night cliff hanger,” added Taylor, 36, who runs a web design company in Montreal.
And besides, at a penny under $8, he figures the cost is minuscule.
“I’m spending that on a coffee and bagel over two days at Timmy’s,” said Taylor, referring to his trips to Tim Hortons.
More than 2.5 million Canadian households will have multiple TV subscriptions, paying for TV through a traditional provider and at least one other online TV service, according to the Deloitte study, released Tuesday.
That’s up more than 150 per cent from 2012 levels.
“Virtually nobody in Canada is actually stopping paying for TV,” said Duncan Stewart, director of research at Deloitte in Toronto.
By the end of 2014, the number of households that will pay for a second basket of TV content will be more than 100 times greater than the number of households that have cut the cord in 2013 and cancelled their TV subscription, Stewart said.
He calls these consumers “cord stackers” as opposed to so-called cord cutters.
About 11.8 million Canadian households subscribed to a traditional TV provider in 2013 while only about 10,000 households cancelled their TV service.
Stewart’s second tech trend is that more seniors will use smartphones this year. He predicts seniors will start closing the “smartphone generation gap,” adding they are the fastest growing demographic for adopting smartphones, both globally and in Canada.
“Everybody else already owns one. Therefore, the only market left is people 55-plus. Just over 30 per cent of this demographic owns smartphones.”
Third on Stewart’s list is eVisits, an electronic alternative to face-to-face visits for basic medical diagnoses to help reduce waiting times in hospital emergency rooms. He’s predicting there will be 75 million eVisits in 2014 in North America, potentially saving more than $3 billion.
“You’re not sitting in front of a computer with a webcam.”
Instead, a patient fills out online forms screened by nurses and doctors, Stewart said, adding that 30 to 40 per cent of all doctor visits can be addressed by such eVisits.
Also included in the predictions is the growing appeal of phablets, part tablet and part smartphone.