With Shomi Gone, Crave TV is Still Going Strong

After Shomi officially announced its closure to be on November 30^th, CraveTV is still going strong. Although it has faced weaknesses in its time, such as originally only allowing Bell and Telus users to access it, it has pulled through and become increasingly popular after making CraveTV “available to all Canadians last January” (Lambert, 2016). CraveTV’s main selling point is its exclusive rights in Canada to

older HBO shows such as ‘The Wire’ and ‘The Sopranos’” (Lambert, 2016). Personally, I find this to be a weakness rather than a threat. Although HBO is a channel enjoyed by many, Crave TV still contains limited streaming options. Netflix provides a wide range of TV series and movies, which clearly seems to overpower CraveTV’s HBO as their selling factor. Zach Fleisher, “a big HBO fan, he abandoned Netflix in the summer” (Lambert, 2016) further proves that CraveTV only seems to be luring in HBO fans, but for other channel fanatics, CraveTV might not be the top of their streaming service list.

With Shomi gone, CraveTV will go head on head with competing against Netflix, a major threat. However, even with CraveTV’s alluring deal of $7.99 per month, it doesn’t seem to be capturing the TV fanatic hearts of many like Netflix. Lydia Chow talks about this in her business article regarding Shomi’s departure. In her article, she analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Shomi, one of which happens to be the cheap price Shomi promotes at a whooping price of $8.99 per month. I agree with Lydia on no matter how cheap minor streaming services are, even when they team up together they cannot overpower the support and loyalty that customers have for Netflix. That one or two dollars’ savings is not a tradeoff big enough to win over loyal hearts. Additionally, Lydia goes on to say how Shomi needs to “adapt an effective and distinct strategy to differentiate itself” (Chow, 2016) which is a key issue that many companies face. A big weakness that minor services such as CraveTV possess is that it tries too hard to become more like Netflix, when they should be focussing on how to make their own value proposition more distinct and to stand out from Netflix. As long as CraveTV stands out with a rocking distinct value proposition, the hopes of it one day dominating Netflix could be plausible.

Work Cited

Crave TV Subscribe

Crave TV Continues to Grow

Netflix vs Shomi vs CraveTV

Lydia Chow’s Blog