Catching up on MediaPolicy.ca – Piling on the CBC – cable TV’s summer hurricane

Tanya Talaga in The Knowing – photo courtesy of CBC

August 24, 2024

This week MediaPolicy posted on the Conservative plan to kill CBC programming and, just maybe, a small-c conservative plan for the public broadcaster to continue operations.

With autumn upon us, CBC has announced its English-language television line-up. The new originals highlighted are two documentaries, the first bringing Tanya Talaga’s book The Knowing about her family experience with residential schools to the screen and another co-commissioned with the BBC titled Paid in Full, a retrospective on the North American black music and musicians.

The returning series are classic Canadiana —Britain’s Coronation Street being the exception– such as Heartland, Murdoch Mysteries, Still Standing, The Passionate Eye, and This Hour has 22 Minutes.

What’s missing (says this one member of the audience) is a new and zippy drama series, à la Sort Of.

None of that value for the taxpayer dollar is going to make a bit of difference to the politics of “defund the CBC.” The bloodlust to put the CBC down is about its insufficiently conservative news curation, not entertainment programming.

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Canada’s agonizing transition from the dominant cable TV platform to streaming is always on preview in the United States where cord-cutting is much further advanced.

This summer two major US cable/streamers Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount announced write-downs of their cable division assets, $9 billion and $6 billion respectively. Of the US studios, those two companies are the most exposed to the declining cable market.

Graphic from Bloomberg News

You can read more on the write-downs here and here.

Some of the market analyst commentary sounds like the last rites. But the short version is this: first off, all is not lost. Streaming is a successful business as witnessed by Netflix’s strong profit position and even the money-losing studios are turning the corner on their transition from cable-only:

The downer is the relentless fragmentation of the advertising market. Competing against the subscription-first streamers are YouTube’s rampaging growth in advertising revenue from the creator economy world of short video and free advertising supported television platforms (mostly third window re-runs). Some of the FAST channels are alternative platforms owned by streamers and Hollywood studios, others belong to device manufacturers embedding them as apps in smart television operating systems.

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