TORONTO – Corus Entertainment has five-point plan in place to guide its transition in the new broadcasting landscape. Its newest priority is to engage its audiences in an interactive way and it plans to do that using its TV everywhere strategy, company president and CEO Doug Murphy said at recent investors conference.
“We can no longer be a one to many traditional broadcaster,” he said in a presentation to BMO Capital Markets’ 16th Annual Telecommunications and Media investors conference earlier this week. “We have a strategy in place to build this two-way relationship principally on using the deployment of our TV Everywhere apps.”
This will soon come to fruition for the company’s children’s programming. Treehouse Go is already operating as an app, and others such as YTV, Disney and Nickelodeon are still in testing, but within the next month or two all of its kids programming will be available as a TV Everywhere app.
Asked how Corus plans to monetize these new channels as apps, Murphy danced around the issue to some extent. He spoke about a number of related elements but pointed out that the investments to make the channels into apps is good for distributors because it helps improve the value proposition to subscribers
“Is that monetizing in terms of viewers on an ad supported basis? No. Do we have the ability to make that an ad supported product in the future? Yes. Will we? I don’t know. Because one of the things that’s happening out there, people – kids and adults – are learning to view content without commercials. So we need to be careful. We need to look at ad loads on our linear services and our streaming services when it’s offline or online such that we don’t run afoul of the behaviour,” he explained.
“We need to look at ad loads on our linear services and our streaming services when it’s offline or online such that we don’t run afoul of the behaviour.” – Doug Murphy, Corus Entertainment
“So we think TV over apps is basically in the near term demonstrating that we’re going to be there given viewer behaviour. How we monetize that in the future, we have some ideas about that.”
During his presentation, Murphy also addressed the impacts of regulatory changes resulting from the Let’s Talk TV hearing last year. The elimination of genre protection and a more flexible licensing process were two he highlighted as being positive.
Changes to genre protection, he said, allowed Corus to flip Teletoon Retro for the Cartoon Network, which is now available in five million homes. “What we’ve done, as part of all of this, is we’ve repositioned our entire kids portfolio. So Cartoon Network in five millions homes is the replica of the Cartoon Network in the US,” he added.
On more flexible licensing, this enabled the company to launch the Disney channel on an exempt licence. It went live on September 1 and is now available to 10 million homes. Having this flexibility, noted Murphy, “gives us a running start.”
The end result, he added, is “we think we have a much stronger suite of services in kids space now, so when it comes to potentially picking a la carte, we think we’re in good order there because we have both indigenous brands like Treehouse, YTV and Teletoon that are well recognized and regarded, but we have the most elite global kids brands also in our portfolio.”
