Bell's Fibe TV gaining momentum

 By Jason Magder, The Gazette

Bell Canada Enterprises’ new television service appears to be taking away television market share from rival Videotron, which has long had a lock on Quebec’s television viewers.

In a conference call Thursday, Videotron CEO Robert Dépatie admitted Bell’s television service has had an impact on its subscriber base, but said over the past year, it lost merely 1.5 per cent of its cable television customers to Bell.
The main reason for that loss was Bell’s launch of Fibe TV, a television service that delivers television services through a high-speed Internet connection, rather than a satellite.
Videotron, which is owned by Quebecor Inc., has a market share of about 70 per cent of households in the province with about 1.9 million cable television subscribers, according to its latest annual report. A loss of 1.5 per cent would mean about 30,000 customers, but Bell vice-president of residential services Nicolas Poitras believes it is much more than that. He said that just in the last quarter, about 38,000 new customers signed up for the service.
“The bulk of subscribers are in Montreal and Quebec City, and the majority are former cable companies that want a better service,” he said. “We’re loading up thousands of new subscribers every month.”
Fibe TV is currently available to about 2.3 million households in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto and its suburbs, with plans to grow by 1 million more households by the end of the year. It now covers about half of Videotron’s coverage area, and it appears to be making the cable provider nervous.
Videotron released its next generation digital television service last May, and while the service was meant to rival Fibe, it was launched without all its features ready. Dépatie said Thursday by the end of the year, the company would add a multi-room feature so customers can record a program on one television and watch the program on another one, something that has been standard on Fibe since the beginning.
“They seem to be struggling to stop the bleeding,” Poitras said.
Maher Yaghi, a financial analyst who covers both companies said for now, Bell appears to have a slight advantage, but he doesn’t expect that to last long.
“The telecommunications companies like Bell and Telus seem to have a more advanced service than the current offering by the cable companies,” he said. “(Cable companies) are trying to close that gap, and they will, in our view. When you look out two to three years in the future, we don’t see a significant difference in the technology platforms between telcos and cable companies.”
jmagder@montrealgazette.com
Twitter: @JasonMagder