Sean Cohan, president of Bell Media, at the Bell Media headquarters in Toronto, on Jan. 16.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
When Bell Media entered the streaming game a decade ago, the landscape looked a little different.
Amazon’s Prime Video wasn’t really a thing. There was no Disney+, or any of the many “plus” competitors that followed (Paramount, Apple TV, Discovery). And Netflix was just beginning to flex its original-programming muscles, leading its catalogue with House of Cards, starring the beloved and not-at-all-problematic Kevin Spacey. To many Canadian households, streaming was a new concept, albeit catching on fast – already, Netflix had about four million Canadian subscribers.
Canada’s telecoms sensed a gold mine – or, more accurately, a foreign-backed threat that needed to be matched. And so Bell’s new subscription video-on-demand service Crave, or CraveTV as it was then branded, was launched barely two months after Rogers and Shaw came together to launch their own streamer, Shomi. Bell was aggressive, offering Crave at just $4 a month, compared with the $9 that Netflix and Shomi were charging. While there was a big catch – CraveTV was initially only accessible to viewers who already had a cable TV subscription with Bell or its partners, with the most basic cable bundle at the time costing $41.95 a month – what was a few more bucks for 10,000-plus hours of additional content, ad-free and on-demand?
Today, as Crave marks its 10th anniversary – its catalogue of content having ballooned alongside its cost, with its most premium ad-free tier running $22 a month – the service has emerged from those fuzzy early days in streaming history to a position both enviable and perilous.
Crave is the fourth-most popular streamer in Canada behind the big three U.S. giants (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+), with Shomi long ago having bitten the dust. The service now has almost 3.5 million subscribers, a 12-per-cent jump from a year ago, with double-digit growth in retention and viewership. Last year was the most watched in Crave streaming history, while this past December marked its most watched month. The streamer has recently forged crucial industry partnerships, including one with Amazon that makes Crave available as an add-on to Prime Video customers, expanding reach and discoverability. And, unlike so many other streamers, Crave is actually profitable.
“And it didn’t just become profitable yesterday, but for multiple years. And meaningfully so,” says Bell Media president Sean Cohan. “To be fair, the audience for streaming is growing, the pie is growing. So you would expect to grow. But we expect to grow even more.”
Yet Crave is facing something of a reckoning, too.
The crises are varied. Owing to the economic downturn and the lingering after-effects of the pandemic-era streaming wars – where so many services pumped out expensive content to lure subscribers – Hollywood is making fewer television series, which are crucial to filling Crave’s catalogue. Last year, Bell cut thousands of jobs across all levels of the company as television advertising revenue fell – a corporate move that was so brutal as to raise the ire of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called it a “garbage decision.” There is simmering frustration over the pace and effectiveness over which the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has handled the Online Streaming Act, or Bill C-11, which was designed to even the playing fields between domestic broadcasters and such foreign-owned streamers as Netflix. And then there is the pure battle for eyeballs, which is only getting more fierce.
Crave is not just competing against its glossier, better-funded American counterparts, but any screen-based distraction. This past fall, the CBC shared an especially distressing report – based on data from the audience-measurement firm Numeris collected from September, 2023, through June, 2024 – that noted foreign-owned platforms accounted for about 96 per cent of total Canadian streaming viewership. Crave is not only fighting the usual streaming suspects and a collection of nascent free ad-supported outfits such as Tubi and Pluto, but also TikTok, Instagram Reels, Twitch and Facebook video. According to the report’s Ontario-carved data, exponentially more Canadians spend their time watching YouTube (32.9 per cent) than Crave (0.6 per cent).
“How are we competing? One is that we make sure we’re delivering compelling content. And two, to make sure we’re delivering it everywhere where people are consuming it and it makes business sense,” Cohan said at his downtown Toronto office. “Whether it’s Netflix or Meta, if people are going there, it means they’re not coming to us. So it’s about working with those companies. We have partnerships with TikTok. YouTube is a storefront for us – not for Crave subscriptions, not today, but for ad-based views. We’ve got to get great content out there where people are watching.”
Cohan joined Bell in the fall of 2023, coming from a leading role at the global measurement and data analytics company Nielsen and before that A+E Networks. Moving into the Canadian market – with its complicated bureaucratic controls and challenging cultural proximity to Hollywood – might not be such an attractive shift for a New Yorker like Cohan, but he saw Bell Media as a globally unique asset, with Crave as its gem.
“Bell has the No. 1 broadcast network, the No. 1 news service and the No. 1 Canadian-owner streamer – this is a future-oriented asset. But I always sensed in a global media context, Canada was a little underestimated,” Cohan explains. “We are the biggest by far acquirer and commissioner of content here. We’ve got a pretty good position to help make change and benefit from it.”
One of Crave’s biggest assets remains its output deal with U.S. media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which allows Crave to be the exclusive home for HBO content (everything from House of the Dragon to The Last of Us), all the films coming out of the Warner Bros. studio (Dune, Barbie, The Batman) and such high-return catalogue titles as Friends and The Big Bang Theory – more than 5,500 hours of Warner content overall. The deal, which Bell Media would not give a price tag on, was renewed this past October for what Cohan calls a “pretty long time.” Which means that Warner’s U.S.-based Max streamer won’t be invading Canadian borders any time soon, no matter the industry rumour that constantly suggests otherwise.
But would Crave crater without its Warner content?
“We have a deal with Sony for their movies, we are acquiring from Lionsgate, with other studios,” says Cohan. “I won’t say something like it’s a tiny minority in HBO, but it’s also just one part of the mix.”
One other crucial element in that mix is Crave’s Canadian content. Such recent standout titles include the ever-expanding Letterkenny/Shoresy universe, Canada’s Drag Race, the Quebec original OD: Tentations au soleil, two versions of The Traitors (English and French) and such big prestige bets as the 2023 series Little Bird, which explored the traumatic legacy of the Sixties Scoop, and this past fall’s drama So Long, Marianne, starring Alex Wolff as a young Leonard Cohen.
“We were two commissioning streams before – this is for CTV, this is for Crave – but now it’s all for Crave,” says Justin Stockman, vice-president of content development and programming for Bell Media. “We’ve leaned into comedy, and have a higher volume of that. Little Bird was a big swing, so we needed press talking, awards. But we were happily surprised it did very well on viewership. Now, we’re trying to do at least one drama per year in originals – something prestige-y, but still Canadian. There has to be a reason why we’re doing it and not just duplicating the efforts of HBO, which we already pay for.”
Coming soon on the CanCon front are second seasons of the comedies The Office Movers and Late Bloomer, plus the debut of Super Team Canada, an animated superhero satire featuring the voices of Will Arnett and Cobie Smulders. Bell Media also recently inked deals with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures and Elliot Page’s production company Pageboy to produce original scripted series for both CTV and Crave, partnerships which should bear fruit next year.
“I’m committed to producing as much as we did last year or maybe more,” says Cohan. “In 2027, is there going to be a ton more commissioned? I expect it to continue to grow in importance as part of our Crave portfolio. We have a mandate, a pressure and a responsibility to produce and acquire as much content as the ravenous consumers want to consume.”
Yet Crave’s homegrown ambitions are difficult to square with the fact that, in 2023, Bell Media applied to the CRTC to request that its required spending on “Programs of National Interest” – scripted dramas and comedies, documentaries, awards shows – be reduced from 7.5 per cent to 5 per cent, and expanded in definition to include such cheaper-to-produce programming as variety and game shows. (Other broadcasters have filed similar requests, and last summer the CRTC suspended Bell Media’s application until it can be considered under broader efforts to modernize the sector under C-11.)
“Historically if we’ve asked for more flexibility, it comes from a place of it being a challenging time in the ecosystem and we continue to see a need for flexibility,” says Cohan. “That said, you shouldn’t read it at all about a question of commitment to commissioning Canadian content. We are the leading acquirer and commissioner in Canada by a country mile. Delivering compelling content to Canadians is our first order of business.”
Absent from that compelling content roster – at least for now – are live events. Late last year, a historic deal was reached allowing the Academy Awards to air both on ABC and stream live on Hulu. But in Canada, the Oscars will only be available to those with access to CTV.
“There will be a day with live events on Crave. I’m not going to say today, but it does fit,” Cohan says.
Yet offering compelling content is one thing, and delivering a seamless experience to consume it is another. Whether it is complaints about video quality or app navigation, Crave’s user-experience (UX) problems are well-known.
“Without teasing future announcements too much, we are working on our UX to make it a better experience,” says Cohan. “Other streamers have shown the way here, to make it a more personalized experience. I don’t think we’re there yet, where we need to be. But we’re working on it.”
In the meantime, Crave is seeking all avenues for growth – including recently bundling its offerings with TSN (a move that should quell rumours from last year that Bell was considering selling the sports network).
“We’d like Crave to be the default first screen for a lot of people,” Cohan says. “I might be delusional, but I’d like to think it’s possible.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Bell Media president Sean Cohan worked at Nielsen analytics before A+E Networks, and that Crave has an output deal with Warner Bros. Media comprising more than 20,000 hours of Warner content. Cohan worked at A+E Networks before Nielsen, and the deal comprises more than 5,500 hours of content. This version has been updated.