Media Beat: February 09, 2018

By David Farrell

The CRTC has requested that Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Google provide a trove of data that would reveal how Canadians consume audio and video content on the internet.  Included in the call are advertising and subscription revenue numbers, free and paid subscriber volumes, Canadian content expenditures and total viewing and listening hours for the past two years.

The regulator says the data will help it prepare a report for the federal government, which ordered it to report back on future models of audio and video distribution in Canada, and how these models will support Canadian content. – Financial Post

– CBC/Radio-Canada and Twitter Canada have announced the 2018 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony will be live streamed on the social network today. This will be the first-ever live stream of select Olympic Games on the social network. The company adds that the Closing Ceremony and five additional streamed events are TBA. According to the social platform promoting 280 characters, the most mentioned and anticipated Olympic sports on Twitter this winter, in descending order, are figure skating, ice hockey, speed skating, bobsledding, and curling.

– Bell Media attracted an average audience of about 4.45M viewers for the Superbowl game, down from 7.32M viewers in 2016. While the number was stable as compared with the 4.47M viewers in 2017, it was down 40 percent from 7.32M viewers in 2016 — the last broadcast before the federal regulator changed the rules to allow US ads to air in Canada – Financial Post

– BCE Inc. won big in a five-day promotional standoff between Canada’s largest wireless carriers in the fourth quarter, reporting its best wireless performance in 15 years thanks to high consumer demand for unprecedented data deals.

Bell added 175,204 wireless subscribers on contract in the three months ended Dec. 31, up 56 percent from the same period in 2016, the company said Thursday. Telus Corp. said it added 121,000 wireless customers in the same period, up 39 percent for its most robust results in five years. Rogers Communications Inc. added only 72,000 customers. – Financial Post

– Shaw Communications is trying to reassure employees about the future of the company – and the possibility of mass layoffs – after receiving a stronger-than-expected response to the voluntary buyout package it unveiled last week, BNN reports.

At the time, Shaw said it expected about 10 percent of workers to accept the offer. However, the response has already surpassed that estimate, and Shaw has been asking some employees to reconsider their decision.

– Vice Media missed its 2017 revenue target of $805 million by more than $100 million, primarily due to the struggles of the company's cable TV channel, Viceland, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Known for its youth-focused digital content and news, has been valued at $5.7B, about twice as much as The New York Times. 

Viceland drew a prime-time average of just 55,000 viewers among adults 18 to 49 in 2017, according to Nielsen. This figure is up 28% from 2016, the year that the channel launched, but it's still well behind established cable channels in entertainment-focused TV – Business Insider

– Sharon Taylor’s radio career has crisscrossed the country from Moose Jaw, Winnipeg, London, Ottawa and Toronto and as anyone who knows her can tell, she’s not scared to express an opinion and she becomes adrenalized when it comes to talking about broadcasting and radio in particular. Matt Cundill caught up with Taylor for one of his Sound Off podcasts. This is one you want to hear.

– Twitter is finally making some money. After nearly 12 years, the company reported its first-ever profitable quarter: It made $91M in the last three months of 2017. Investors loved the flip, and the Twitter stock is up almost 16 percent. But it didn’t get there by growing its business. It got there by cutting costs – Recode

– UK lawmakers visiting the US didn’t pull any punches at a Washington DC hearing on fake news Thursday.

“Isn’t Facebook a massive surveillance operation?” Quartz Mediareports conservative MP Rebecca Pow asking. Members of the UK House of Commons’s digital, culture, media and sport committee called US tech companies to George Washington University yesterday, questioning representatives of Facebook, Alphabet, and Twitter, as well as academics and journalists on the general topic of fake news.

Separately, The Star reports that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has warned social networking giant Facebook it needs to fix its “fake news” problems or face stronger regulation from Ottawa.

– Social media puts precious little in publishers’ pockets.  Only 5 percent of publishers' total average digital revenue was generated by Facebook and Google, according to a report from industry trade organization Digital Content Next (DCN).– CBS News

– Caffeine, a new social broadcasting platform and toolset for games and entertainment, has secured US$46M in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners.  Co-founded by former Apple execs Ben Keighran and Sam Roberts, Caffeine is pitched as personal, real-time, and safe one-click broadcasting solution with games at its core. It is currently unclear as to how exactly content creators will monetize, but the platform has promised that a "re-imagined, easy to use monetization system" will be coming to the in early 2018. – Gamasutra

– The North American Broadcasters Association and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) have jointly worked to develop the World Broadcasting Unions’ (WBU) Cyber Security Recommendations for Media Vendors, Systems Software and Services, a set of cyber security recommendations intended to create a dialogue with media vendors and broadcast organizations to achieve more consistent and effective compliance with cyber security requirements. 

The WBU Cyber Security Recommendations document is supported by the EBU, NABA, and sister unions including the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU), the Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU), the African Union of Broadcasting (AUB), the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU), and the International Association of Broadcasting (IAB/AIR).

– Google has been fined US$21.21M by India's competition regulator for abusing its dominance in the country. Users searching flight details were directed to Google's flight search page, the Competition Commission of India found. – BBC News

– Users of Snapchat account for 50 percent of all movie ticket sales in the US, according to data Snapchat’s corporate parent Snap Inc. shared with Variety this week