The big news in Canadian telecom from the first quarter was the hit the Big Three took from their Internet and landline customer base. They are leaving in droves heavily impacting all facets of Big Telco’s business.

Just yesterday Rogers released its numbers and they suffered a 17 per cent drop in first-quarter income.

From reports from the Toronto Star and Reuters:

The profit decline follows a regulator’s ruling that ended 30-day notice periods before cancellation of telecom service contracts, a change that lowered cable revenue by $3 million.

Rogers also lost 41,000 cable-TV subscribers, 7,000 Internet customers and 20,000 landline telephone lines in the first quarter.

It said much of that slip was caused by the elimination of a 30-day waiting period before TV, Internet and landline phone contracts could be canceled.

The CRTC first announced their plan to eliminate the 30-day waiting period for cancellation of a service late last year, and if the first quarter of ruling’s implementation is any indicator, it’s something Canadians have truly embraced. No longer are they faced with “Win Back” strategies that offered price matching or special promos; discounts that were usually short-term so Canadians ended up spending just as much or more overall as they would have anyway prior to the “deal.”

Now Canadian ISP’s have only one way to keep their customers: Offer a great service at a fair price and earn the trust of the consumer. It’s been Worldline’s business model from day 1 and that’s why we embraced this new ruling.

Unlike Rogers, who saw a precipitous drop in its Internet and home phone customer base, Worldline just celebrated the greatest first quarter in company history, virtually tripling our sales over last year.

Thanks to the CRTC for making it easier for Canadians to switch and save. And thanks to all the new Worldline customers we’ve added in the past few months. Welcome!

Drogon drops in on Daenerys in Game of Thrones Season 5

The leak of four Game of Thrones episodes from its latest season was front page news across the world. The copies, leaked from a review screener, quickly spread across public torrent sites and were downloaded millions of times.

In response HBO sent out a flurry of takedown notices to those who shared the leaks online. Through its anti-piracy partner IP-Echelon, HBO instructs Internet providers to relay the alerts to the account holder associated with the infringing IP-address.

HBO hopes that the warnings will deter some from downloading future episodes. Good luck with that as the Game of Thrones is the most pirated television series ever.

In January, the CRTC mandated that Canadian Internet Service Providers pass along notices from copyright holders to their customers that have been detected illegally downloading content via Peer-to-Peer services on the Internet.

This is called the Notice and Notice policy and Worldline is now sending out these notifications to our customers:

From: On Behalf Of Fibernetics Sent: Friday, February 13, 2015 9:53 AM To: Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxxx Subject: Copyright Infringement Notice

Dear Customer,

Worldline has received what the Copyright Act calls a “Notice of Claimed Infringement”…..

But you should be aware, some shady online characters are already “phishing” for money using this policy as a front. They are sending out notices like the one below demanding payment. These are not legitimate requests from the copyright holders. Rather it is from Internet scam artists looking to shake down people online by leveraging the Notice and Notice policy:

Just to be clear, if you do receive a Notice and Notice email from us, your activity has been noted by the copyright holder. However you are not in any way shape or form being asked to pay anything. If you receive a notice like the one above, ignore it.

You can read more about Worldline and the Notice and Notice policy here.

It’s a shocking report. For decades the growth in TV subscriptions in Canada had been increasing year over year.

The resulting subscription base changed the telecom industry in a dramatic way as the major ISP’s started gobbling up TV networks for their content to maximise profits.

Now, with the onset of over-the-top services like Netflix, the entire industry is being shaken to its foundations.

Canadians are dumping their TV services at an ever increasing rate. What was once a trickle is now a veritable Niagara Falls with TV subscriptions across the country, for the first time ever, dropping, but fast.

Here’s an excerpt from a Canadian Press story by David Friend:

More Canadians scrapping cable packages or never signing up: report

TORONTO – More Canadians are choosing to cancel their cable TV and satellite packages and a new report suggests there’s no sign of the migration slowing down.

The Convergence Consulting Group says about 95,000 fewer households had a cable TV or satellite subscription at the end of 2014, compared with 2013, as the number of viewers who have decided to forgo traditional TV services grew sharply.

By those estimates, more than 21 per cent of Canadian households or 3.09 million homes did not have a cable TV or satellite TV subscription at the end of last year.

“These are very strong drops in TV,” said Brahm Eiley, president of Convergence Consulting, a Toronto-based firm that collects extensive data on the North American cable and phone industries.

“It’s a very big deal in Canada. Everybody talked about this before, but if you go back a couple years … we had been adding TV subscribers.”

Growth in the Canadian TV market was steady from 2007 to 2011, with annual subscriber additions averaging about 220,000 households, Eiley said.

But in 2013, a change in direction started to emerge, with the number of TV subscriptions falling by 13,000.

This year, Eiley expects the industry will lose another 97,000, as the shift away from paying for traditional TV services continues at a stronger clip.

From continuous growth of subscribers, to a slight drop off, and now to a cascade. the downward trend is remarkable in just a few short years. Of course it will only increase as more “over-the-top” services come online. HBO and CBS are already available as a subscription option on the States, and it’s only a matter of time until they become available here.

Of course this change in the way Canadians get their entertainment content is another way for Big Telco to make money. Adding in data caps allows them to make up revenue that they lost from cancelled or slimmed down TV subscriptions.

That’s why having Unlimited Internet is so important now. If you don’t have it, you are probably paying what you used to before cutting that cable.

We’ve been tracking this trend at Worldline for the past three years. As a result of this market demand, we are focusing on providing an optimized service for this increasingly important demographic; those who simply had enough with Big Telco and want fairly priced high speed and unlimited Internet.