Canadian Savvy: TV Guide Online Only

Todd Chanko | October 24, 2006, 05:42 PM

It’s very hard to make a buck when the goods you’re selling are fungible. There’s no pricing power and differentiation is essentially impossible. That’s what the demise of the once innovative Canadian edition of TV Guide as a print publication demonstrates. Transcontinental, one of the largest printers in North America, is shuttering the venerable publication – which severed links with its News Corporation-owned US sister publication years ago – and migrating it to the web as an ad-supported vehicle. Certainly, as an online entity TV Guide makes sense, providing TV viewers functionalities not even imagined when Annenberg launched TV Guide in 1953. Unfortunately, while Transcontinental will undoubtedly save considerable expense – not to mention trees – it will still face steep competition from the Canadian equivalents of such sites as Titan TV and MeeVee. Moreover, digital cable and satellite operators’ EPGs, having already substituted for the print edition of TV Guide, will continue to do so for its online reincarnation.

Now if they can incorporate a revolutionary online video search component, as well, then we’re talking. In fact, soon I’ll be publishing a report on the very topic of online video search. But that’s for another blog.