One of Canada’s biggest media companies is hoping that adding news content into its streaming service Crave will act as a local differentiator to its global competitors.
Bell Media owns Crave, an entertainment streaming service which largely competes with US subscriptions like Disney+ and Netflix.
However content from CTV News, one of Canada‘s biggest news providers by audience, is now being added as part of a major drive to grow the subscriber base.
This is expected to include local and national news linear TV programming and CTV Sunday morning political programme Question Period as well as on-demand specials and investigative reports.
Thousands of hours of CTV’s linear TV programming, including sports and daytime talk shows, are also being added to the service.
Crave costs CAD$11.99 (£6.48) per month for the standard package with adverts or CAD$22 (£11.89) for a premium subscription that includes the ability to stream in four places at once instead of two plus watch live channels.
Bell Media’s VP for local TV, radio and Bell Media Studios Dave Daigle told Press Gazette: “From our standpoint, as we look to go where audiences are, we recognise that there’s a significant opportunity with Crave.
“We feel that Crave will give us a chance to attract and engage new audiences. It will amplify our local and our national news content. So it will be a portal where perhaps those that kind of moved away from linear can go and get our content and be connected to their local community, or from a national standpoint as well.”
Daigle said CTV News has a “multi-pronged approach when it comes to finding and attracting and keeping audiences” across short and long-form content on Youtube, FAST channels, podcasts, a “robust” website strategy and leaning in “aggressively” on social media.
“Now, we think the next natural step is to look at our SVOD [subscription video on demand] and, more specifically, Crave and make sure that the content that Canadians want is also on where they’re actually consuming products.”
More than one million viewers watch the 6pm local news bulletins from CTV News each evening.
Daigle said CTV News has also been the “number one digital news service” in Canada for 20 out of the last 21 months.
Bell Media president Sean Cohan told Press Gazette the linear TV audience for local news is not declining but is “pretty consistent or pretty resilient”.
He said viewership “hasn’t actually been shrinking in the news genre. And yet… we think that making sure that news is available and merchandised well in our most prominent shop window, if you will, which is Crave, is an important way for us to maintain and grow an audience for news and maintain a relevance for news.”
[Read more: President of Canada’s Bell Media says FAST news channel growing quickly]
However he admitted that they “don’t know what the viewership is going to be like on Crave for news.
“This hasn’t been done a tonne of times. If I look at the HBO Max experience in the US when they had a CNN strand there – I can’t speak to it, my sense is that viewership there wasn’t astounding.”
Cohan continued: “But I do think that streamers generally are moving in this direction, recognising that there is still a need for, an appetite for and a relevance to news and there’s an audience there, whether that’s the linear audience, people that consume it linearly or it’s a whole new audience that needs their news and today is getting it somewhere else…
“It is an audience play, but for us, maybe more because of the stability and resilience, at least recently, of our linear news services, I’d like to think it could be an audience growth play for for news, rather than a maintain or, you know, stem the bleeding.”
He described it as a multi-year project to make sure they are delivering what consumers want where they want to get it.
The changes will also deliver a more personalised experience in line with the global streamers, he said. Users will initially be surfaced news from their region and in their language, but this will ultimately grow more sophisticated, Cohan suggested.
Crave had three million subscribers at the start of 2024 and has just passed 4.3 million. It is targeting six million by the end of 2028 and Cohan said they are “on track, maybe even slightly ahead, to get to our goal”.
They set that target, Cohan said, after realising they “should probably be a fair bit more trafficked with all this great content and a lot of viewership moving to streaming”. He cited the fact there are around 15 million households in Canada.
They have been using, he said, a “bunch of different levers” to find growth including doing more marketing of its French-language content in French Canada, bundling with other subscriptions, improving the user experience, and now broadening the service.
Bell Media reaches 98% of Canadians every month and Cohan said he hoped the expansion would help ensure people think of Bell Media platforms like Crave as their “default home for news, entertainment and sport”.
“I’ve got no delusions that there will be some lessons learned, and what people will watch won’t always be what we expect them to, but that’s our business,” Cohan said.
“It’s taking calculated risk and making some guesses and some practical experiments, and then continuing to grow and learn from it and and hoping to continue to improve the user experience and the user journey to drive more joy and less frustration.”
Bell Media is owned by Canada’s biggest communications (internet and IT tech) company BCE Inc.
In the company’s latest quarterly results, published on 6 November, Bell Media reported revenue down 6% to $732m amid drops in both advertising and subscriber revenue. The advertising growth area was in digital video, namely connected TV and ad-supported subscription tiers on Crave.
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