CBC going to court to fight disclosure order for Gem subscriber numbers

The CBC logo is projected onto a screen in Toronto on May 29, 2019.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Tijana Martin

OTTAWA — CBC/Radio-Canada is going to court to defend its refusal to disclose subscriber numbers for its Gem streaming service.

The move comes after the information commissioner ordered CBC to make available the number of paid subscribers to Gem.

A CBC spokesperson said the public broadcaster believes the information commissioner’s interpretation of the law is wrong.

“We will make our case in our filing with the Federal Court and let the court decide,” Leon Mar said in an email.

Matt Malone, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa, first asked for the information in an access-to-information request.

When CBC refused, citing exemptions for programming activities and information that could harm its competitive position, Malone appealed to the federal information commissioner. The information commissioner disagreed with the CBC, and in July ordered the public broadcaster to disclose the numbers.

The fact that the CBC is willing to go to court is “a very interesting use of CBC’s precious resources,” Malone said.

“In my opinion, it’s a sad but telling attempt to dodge basic transparency.”

Malone argued CBC’s refusal to comply with the order sets a bad precedent, “especially for the CBC journalists who still use the access-to-information requests as part of their journalistic work and try to get disclosure from federal institutions.”

CBC launched the streaming service, which has both paid and free versions, in 2018. The paid version, which costs $5.99 a month, includes ad-free on-demand streaming and a stream of CBC’s 24-hour news channel, CBC News Network.

Mar said CBC does not disclose either the paid or unpaid subscriber numbers.

Kaan Yigit, principal at the market research company The Strategic Counsel, noted not releasing Canadian subscriber numbers has “become a bit of an industry practice.”

He said the company’s research indicates Gem garners “respectable numbers on a weekly basis in the same range as Bell’s Crave and a bit better than Paramount+ and Tubi.”

However, those numbers would be for all users, with paying subscribers likely making up a smaller subset.

Given the number of streaming services available, some of which have implemented recent price increases, “it would not be surprising that paid subscribers would only be a small portion of their base as consumers are trying to balance free and paid tier streaming subscriptions and some with cable,” Yigit said in an email.

“Why take a paid tier when you can have much of what they offer for free?”

In her final report on the access-to-information complaint, Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard wrote that she agrees the subscriber numbers relate to CBC’s programming activities, but they also relate to its general administration, which means the exemption to disclosure does not apply.

The report noted that CBC argued it competes with other streaming services, and that “releasing the information at issue would harm its competitive position by providing sensitive data to these competitors, allowing them to use it to be more aggressive in their attempts to lure paid subscribers from the Gem platform to theirs.”

But Maynard concluded that overall, “while CBC did identify possible harms to its competitive position or to ongoing negotiations, it did not demonstrate that there was a reasonable expectation that these harms could occur, well beyond a mere possibility.”

Barry Kiefl, president of research company Canadian Media Research, said there has been very little public information about Gem audiences. He pointed to numbers provided by CBC to industry publication C21 last year, indicating viewership of both Crave and CBC’s streaming services is completely dwarfed by foreign streaming competitors and social media in Ontario.

More data may soon be available. He noted audience measurement company Numeris is expected to begin providing national data on streaming numbers this fall.

Kiefl said CBC has shared information about how many people watch and listen to its TV and radio broadcasts.

But, he noted, “they have been dead silent for over 20 years about how their digital services are doing on an audience basis.”

Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press

CTV News, CP24, BNN Bloomberg and Crave are owned by Bell Media, which is a division of BCE.