Media and Internet Concentration in Canada, 1984 – 2018

Every year the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project puts out two reports on the state of the telecoms, internet, and media industries in Canada. This is the second installment in this year’s series. Whereas the first report in this series examines the growth, development and upheaval that are transforming the media industries in Canada, this report takes a step further by asking a deceptively simple but profoundly important question: have these industries—individually and collectively—become more or less concentrated over time? The report does so by examining the state of competition and concentration in the mobile wireless and wireline telecoms market, broadband internet access, cable, satellite & IPTV services, broadcast television and radio, specialty and pay television services, online video subscription and download services, newspapers, magazines, internet advertising, search engines, social media as well as mobile and desktop operating systems and browsers. This year’s report also adds significantly to our efforts last year to examine the dynamics of advertising spending across all media in Canada, i.e. TV, radio, online, newspapers, magazines and out-of-doors. As we noted in our first report, we have also significantly expanded our coverage by taking some preliminary steps to capture a broader range of audiovisual media services that are delivered over the internet.