What a difference a week makes!

It was only a week ago that I was writing about how up here in Canada TELUS is coming on strong with their Optik TV promotions, and the week before that how syndicates of broadcasters have rolled out Shomi and Crave, streaming TV services that seek to compete with Netflix.

Well, the hits just keep on coming.

This past week has been a blowout of news about broadcast, on both sides of the border.

When I had previously talked about Canadian broadcasters’ streaming services, it was noted that Crave’s $4 a month service was only available to Bell subscribers.

That changed last week when Bell announced partnerships, not with the other two carriers in the Big Three, but with small regional players. More small regional players than I knew still existed in Canada, all of them in various corners of rural Ontario, as well as Eastlink in the Maritimes.

That’s only the beginning of the streaming news, however.

At the Apple event, where they also unveiled the new MacBook and Apple Watch, Apple announced their partnership with HBO for exclusive access to HBO

Now, an online subscription-based streaming service for US$14.99/month via Apple TV that is unbundled from the need for an HBO cable subscription.

Both Apple and HBO hope that access to a catalog of more than 2,000 titles, including HBO’s critically acclaimed original series shows will be an inducement to both existing and potential Apple TV owners.

As if that wasn’t enough, not long after news began to leak that Apple, looking to make Apple TV more than just what they’ve called a “hobby category” is in talks with major US broadcasters Fox, CBS, and ABC (talks with NBC have stalled, or broken off, depending on who’s reporting it) to build a basic TV package on Apple TV to compete with basic cable.

All of that makes perfect sense in the context of broadcasters scrambling for a Plan B in the face of what’s often reported as a surge of cord cutting ex-cable subscribers. I know that my social media feed is full of friends and acquaintances who gleefully report that they’ve cut the cord and haven’t looked back.

The sea change in the broadcaster/subscriber dynamic and these momentous and, frankly, sudden announcements build up to the last news item, which takes us back north of the border again.

Canada’s Radio and Telecommunications Commission has ruled that by December 2016 Canadian broadcasters have to de-bundle specialty TV and provide a la carte programming for individual channels, beyond what’s been dubbed a “skinny basic” network TV cable service that is mandated to cost no more than $25 a month.

With a skinny basic subscription Canadians will be able to pick and choose the specialty channels they want, without being encumbered by a bundle of channels they don’t want.

The debate leading up to this ruling has been hotly contested by consumer advocate groups and naturally the broadcasters themselves. Some critics have suggested that Canadians’ cable bills will ultimately end costing them the same dollars per month, but with their services shuffled around and billed differently: that single channels will cost more than the bundles because less-popular channels will no longer be subsidized.

It’s been a real roller coaster. I can’t wait to see what happens next week!