Digital entertainment in Canada - Statistics & Facts

In the digital age, industries are constantly evolving in order to catch up with new trends and innovations. As technologies gain momentum, different traditional forms of entertainment are bound to be changed significantly. In consequence, the Canadian entertainment industry remains no stranger to the digitalization processes occurring on global markets.

Although print books were still preferred by Canadian readers as of early 2015, e-books and audiobooks were rising in mainstream popularity. At that time, around 22 percent of Canadians read e-books at least several times a week. Furthermore, 17 percent of Canadians said they read digital books on a daily basis, and 10 percent said the same about listening to audiobooks. The latter format was also the only one to show growth in terms of book purchase share in Canada between 2013 and 2015.

In the music industry, impacts of technological evolution are evident based on the shift from the purchase of physical formats to digital ones, including streaming online. The number of music streaming users in Canada is expected to reach 8.7 million in 2020, up from 5.04 million in 2014; whereas, the number of users who download music from the internet is projected to grow from 3.89 million to 5.33 million in the same period.

Forecasts of the digital video market in Canada show that the number of viewers of the most popular video format, subscription video-on-demand (SVoD), is expected to grow from 5.8 million in 2015 to more than nine million in 2020. It comes as no surprise then that the prime pay TV provider Netflix has been quickly gaining subscribers since its launch in Canada in 2010. By the end of 2015, Netflix’s paying subscriber base amounted to nearly four million. In 2014, the online video platform reached almost half of the population in Alberta.

The digital games industry in Canada is projected to gain revenues consistently over the next few years. Mobile gaming is expected to surpass full version downloads, based on the number of users, and lead the industry with an estimated 436 million U.S. dollar revenue by 2020.



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