Whether it is Morse code, telephone, music from Spotify or movies streamed to your TV or smartphone, all signals need a carrier -- telephone land lines, fibre optic cable, mobile phone cell towers, satellites and receivers.
And while big tech and media companies like Amazon and Netflix are increasingly encroaching on Canada’s network media industry, the carrier is still king, according to the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project (GMIC Project).
In a new report, the GMIC Project notes that Canada’s network media industry -- telecommunications, internet, digital media, broadcasting, publishing, online gaming and streaming -- is growing at a “brisk” pace.
Total revenues reached $108 billion last year, up 17 per cent since 2019. Of that total, telecoms and ISPs accounted for $69 billion -- “two-and-a half times the size of all digital markets combined.”
“While there is no doubt that digital media have become central to the media economy and to daily life, they are still overshadowed by the much bigger telecoms and internet access sectors,” the report says.
By revenue, the top 10 companies in the network media sector in Canada are Bell Canada, Rogers, Telus, Alphabet, Quebecor, Meta, Amazon, CBC, Cogeco, and Netflix, in that order.
“The biggest companies now and for the past 150 years have been telecoms companies,” the report says.
Four companies dominate Canada’s telecom and ISP sector: Bell, Rogers, Telus, and Vidéotron (Quebecor). Until last year, there were five, but it was reduced to four after Rogers acquired Shaw for $26 billion.
Among these major telecoms, B.C.-based Telus is unique in being a pureplay carrier.
Bell owns television assets, such as CTV, TSN and Crave. Rogers owns Citytv and Sportsnet, and Quebecor owns a number of media assets, including TV stations. Telus offers television and streaming through its Optik TV and Pik TV, but owns no broadcasting assets.
In an era where telecoms that own media assets are seeing increasing competition from tech and media giants, like streaming companies, and losing advertising revenue to them, Telus’ strategy of sticking to being a pureplay carrier has proven a smart business model.
The report’s author, Dwayne Winseck, a professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University and director of the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project, said broadcasting is “small little ornaments on this massive edifice.”
“They don’t crank out near the profits that the telecom side does,” Winseck told BIV News. “They’ve got a smaller revenue base, profit levels that are third to a quarter what they are on the telecom side, and things are going south on at least the advertising, free-over-the-air broadcasting assets. Telus has been able to avoid that.”
The report notes that Musk’s Starlink has begun to fill broadband gaps in Canada, notably Northern Canada, which is under served by telecoms and ISPs. The report notes that Starlink now has 400,000 subscribers in Canada, with revenues estimated at $420 million.
“It is now the sixth largest ISP in Canada,” the report says. “It is also set to grow much bigger, for example, with the Ontario government’s recent commitment of $100 million to fund subscriber equipment and assured capacity starting in June 2025.
The report forecasts a “Goliath versus Goliath clash” between Canada’s largest telecoms and “multinational big tech conglomerates like Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Bytedance, streaming giants like Netflix and Spotify, and American and international media conglomerates (like Disney, Viacom-CBS-Paramount, Sony, Warner Music, Universal Music, and Ubisoft.
“This rivalry will continue to grow as cloud computing offloads more information flows from the telecoms’ system, but there will forever be a need for telecoms networks to make the last and middle mile links between that information and people.”
Amazon, Apple and Alphabet have all been moving into the space of aggregation and distribution of film and TV content.
“We’ve got the biggest telecoms in Canada now increasingly bumping up against these planetary scale digital communication and media aggregation and content distribution machines,” Winseck said. “They’re facing real competition.”
Winseck notes that Starlink has taken market share from Xplore Inc., which specializes in providing internet services in remote and rural communities. Meanwhile, Telesat is planning to roll out its Lightspeed satellite-based broadband and 5G service in Canada in 2026 to deliver broadband to underserved communities.
Winseck said satellite-based internet service will fill in the broadband gaps in Canada, but does not see it overtaking traditional telecom and internet service.
“I don’t see wireless solutions ever as a substitute for wireline,” he said.
