Highlights

View the most recent version.

• As of August 31, 2006, little more than a year after the cable industry’s largest companies entered the telephony market, the industry had 927,463 subscribed clients. This is a quantum leap of 338%, compared to a year earlier when there were 211,683 subscribers.

• The industry continued to expand its network and the number of potential customers for telephony services nearly doubled, jumping from 4.3 million in 2005 to 8.4 million in 2006.

• The client pool for Internet services is not expanding as quickly as before, but high-speed Internet remains a fast-growing market for cable operators. The number of cable Internet subscribers reached 4.0 million by the end of August 2006—a 17.2% jump from the previous year.

• One home in three with the option to subscribe to Internet cable chose to do so. Across the country, however, high-speed cable Internet subscriptions vary considerably from one region to the next. In Quebec, 27.5% of households with the possibility of subscribing did so, compared with 36.5% in the western provinces.

• Cable operators saw the number of subscribers to their traditional television service increase to 7.8 million on August 31, 2006, up 2.2% from 2005. This was the strongest year over year increase since 1994 when growth was at 2.3%. This recovery is most apparent in Quebec (+ 4.6%) and in Ontario (+ 2.1%). Elsewhere in the country, the situation has not changed significantly compared to the previous year.

• While the number of subscribers to cable television (all technologies included) increased by a relatively modest 2.2% in 2006, subscriptions to digital cable soared from 2.3 million in 2005 to 2.8 million in 2006. 

• The addition of numerous clients in the industry’s three main niches led to a 15.9% leap in subscription revenue, which went from 5.1 billion dollars in 2005 to 5.9 billion dollars in 2006.

• Two thirds of the additional 800 million dollars in revenue came from non-traditional services, mainly Internet access provision and telephony. Internet access provision yielded 1.7 billion dollars in revenue in 2006, a 19.9% increase from 2005, while telephony generated revenues of 267.8 million dollars in 2006—five times more than in 2005.

• In 2006, cable operators made 1.5 billion dollars in profits before interest and taxes, an increase of 11.6% from the previous year. This represents a profit of 24.1 cents for each dollar of revenue in 2006, slightly less than 24.9 cents per dollar a year earlier. 

• The number of subscribers of wireless competitors—mainly satellite television service provider—reached 2.6 million in 2006, up 5.5% from 2005. The market share of the wireless segment increased from 24.7% in 2005 to 25.3% in 2006 and its revenues rose by 17.5% to reach 1.7 billion dollars.

• For the second straight year, wireless competitors made modest profits before interest and taxes. They reached 37.0 million dollars in 2006, slightly less than the 44.0 million dollars reached in 2005.