Amazon Prime Video is headed to Canada. That’s what Bell Media’s president Mary Ann Turcke said this week at a Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hearing.
The streaming service being available in Canada has been teased for a while (most recently on Twitter by Grand Tour host Jeremy Clarkson who posted: “So. People of Ireland, Canada, Australia and pretty well everywhere else. You WILL be able to watch the Grand Tour. Amazon has gone global”), but nothing official was announced until now.
Turcke made the comments when speaking about the challenges facing Canadian TV broadcasters today, notably competition from global streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.
Bell Media operates a streaming service of their own, CraveTV, – which just passed one million subscribers and is one of the larger streaming services in the nation. Like in the US, Netflix is the most popular streaming service in Canada, where it has just over 5 million subscribers.
Amazon has been quietly picking up distribution rights to popular shows in Canada, so it’s evident they’ve had their eye on expansion for a while. It’s not clear yet whether Canadians will have access to the full Amazon library of titles or just selected ones, but either way, this is great news for Canadian cord-cutters.
