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The big broadcasters and BDUs fought this, but by September 14th, those companies had to file their aggregate financial data from their 2008 fiscal years with the CRTC. The Commission later posted the figures on its website.
The numbers quoted for broadcasters below do not include specialty channels as the CRTC compiles those separately, and for the BDUs we mostly didn't include their phone and data revenue, just TV.
BDUs
- Shaw is the biggest BDU, earning $1.97 billion in revenue from Shaw Cable and Shaw Direct ($1.32 billion and $650 million, respectively). Rogers is the biggest cable company, earning $1.6 billion from its cable TV operations.
- Shaw is more frugal, spending $304.3 million on its cable platform technical infrastructure to Rogers' $371.7 million in 2008, despite nearly equal subscriber numbers (2.2 million and change). On the sales and promotions side, Rogers reports spending $226 million and Shaw just $65.8 million, less than even Videotron's S&P spend of $70.4 million on the Quebec MSO's revenue line of $840 million.
- Shaw spent $407 million on affiliate fees in 2008 for cable and $210.3 million on the Shaw Direct side. As a comparison, Rogers Cable paid $463 million in affiliate payments to specialty channels in 2008 and Bell TV paid $526 million.
- On the PBIT line (profits before interest and taxes), Shaw's (cable plus DTH) is a whopping $870 million, compared to Rogers' healthy $451.8 million, Videotron's $120.8 million, Cogeco's $95.8 million and BellTV's negative-$65 million.
- The amount of money coming out of the five BDUs and going towards Canadian content in the form of community channels, the Canadian Television Fund, or other funds, totalled $318 million in 2008.
Broadcasters
- CBC TV (counting English and French together) has the highest revenue, coming in at $1.25 billion, most from its government appropriation. It also posted the largest loss in 2008 of any broadcaster coming in at -$32.5 million on the French side and -$15.3 million on the English.
- CTV lost $13.6 million on $840.1 million in revenue while Global TV took a smaller loss of $1.8 million on $584.7 million in 2008 revenue.
- Rogers' Citytv and OMNI properties together lost $36.7 million that year on $206.7 million in revenue.
- CTV reported local ad revenue of $149 million while total expenses on local news and information programming was $143.5 million, meaning local advertisers managed to at least cover the costs of local content.
- Global's local content cost $101.7 million to produce in 2008 (when they still owned the E! stations) with local ad revenue of $77.2 million helping there. But even then, if we take just 10% of the $474 million national advertisers spent with Global, that more than covers the costs of local programming (and national advertisers are still buying local news).
- Quebecor's TVA was profitable in 2008, showing PBIT of $33.2 million on revenue of $248.5 million.
- Just counting these OTA broadcasters and large BDUs, the figures show that about $1.04 billion goes to U.S. broadcasters and producers. A total of $270.6 million was paid in 2008 to foreign (mostly American) cable channels while the large TV broadcasters paid $766.3 million for foreign (mostly American) TV shows.
- BDUs paid more than $1.8 billion in affiliate fees to Canadian services while broadcasters collectively invested $1.25 billion in Canadian content.
- While BDUs in 2008 invested $1.3 billion in their networks in 2008, or 15% of the collective $8.65 billion in revenue earned by BDUs for all that they offered in 2008 (BDUs earned 73% of that revenue from TV, by the way), broadcasters spent just under 5% of total revenues on technical operations, or $155.5 million.
To view the full CRTC release, click here.
Source: Cartt, 09/29/2009
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