On this page
Cord cutting in Canada just crossed a line most people didn't notice: leaving cable is no longer the exception, it's fast becoming the rule. Fresh 2026 data from the Convergence Research Group shows that nearly half of Canadian households now live without any traditional cable, satellite or telco TV subscription — and the firm expects the cordless majority to arrive before the year is out. Meanwhile, streaming revenue is closing in on the money cable still pulls in. Here's what the newest numbers say, why pay-TV keeps sliding, and what it means if you're weighing your own escape from the bundle.
The Key Numbers
Convergence Research Group's March 2026 report, "The Battle for the Canadian Couch Potato," is the most-watched annual read on this shift. Its headline figures paint an unambiguous picture:
| Metric (Convergence, March 2026) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Canadian households with no traditional TV subscription (2025) | 48.5% |
| Forecast households cordless by 2028 | ~57% |
| Canadian cable/satellite/telco TV revenue (2025) | $6.2 billion, down 5% |
| Canadian OTT (streaming) subscription revenue (2025) | $4.8 billion, up 15% |
| Forecast OTT revenue (2026) | $5.35 billion, up 11.5% |
| Average price hike across 10 leading OTT providers (2025) | 7% |
Read those two revenue lines together and the story tells itself: cable is shrinking about 5% a year while streaming is growing at double digits. Convergence projects that in 2027, streaming subscription revenue will overtake annual traditional TV subscription revenue in Canada outright — the crossover that industry-watchers have predicted for a decade, finally arriving. You can see the report summarized by trade outlets like Cartt.ca and Broadcast Dialogue.
Why Cord Cutting in Canada Is Accelerating
The forces behind cord cutting in Canada aren't mysterious — they're mostly about price and flexibility. A full cable bundle with a set-top box, regional-sports fees and add-ons routinely runs north of $100 a month, and it climbs a little every year. Streaming, by contrast, offers cheap, cancel-anytime entry points: you can start a service for well under $20, watch what you want, and drop it when you're done.
Convergence found that Canadian traditional-TV subscriber numbers fell about 4% in 2025, and revenue slid 5% to roughly $6.2 billion, with similar annual declines forecast through 2028. On the other side of the ledger, OTT subscription revenue jumped 15% to $4.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow another 11.5% in 2026, to $5.35 billion. The report is built on an analysis of more than 55 streaming services from over 35 providers, led by Netflix.
There's also a generational engine underneath the numbers. It isn't only that existing customers are cancelling — it's that younger households increasingly never subscribe to cable at all. They grow up on streaming apps and a phone, and a traditional TV package simply never enters the picture. That's why the trend compounds year after year rather than levelling off. When half of all homes are cordless and the under-35 crowd treats cable as something their parents had, the direction only points one way.
Value perception matters too. When a cable bill lands with dozens of channels you never open, paying for flexibility starts to feel smarter than paying for sheer volume — even though streaming's own prices are creeping up. Convergence pegged the average 2025 increase across ten leading OTT providers at 7%, yet households still see cancel-anytime apps as more forgiving than a locked-in, contract-bound bundle.
The Provider Picture: Cable and Satellite Keep Shrinking
You can see the same story in what the big carriers tell their investors. Canada's largest TV providers — Bell, Rogers, Telus, Quebecor's Videotron and Cogeco — have all been managing steady erosion in their traditional television bases, and they've stopped pretending otherwise. Rogers has guided investors to expect continued declines in its television and satellite subscribers as customers migrate toward streaming and other over-the-top services. Bell, likewise, has flagged higher losses in its legacy TV product as households substitute streaming for the old bundle.
The carriers' response has been telling. Rather than fight the tide, several are quietly repackaging themselves around it — pushing internet-delivered (IPTV) bundles, launching their own streaming add-ons, and leaning on broadband rather than the TV package as the thing that keeps a customer. In other words, the companies that built their business on the cable bundle are themselves betting that the bundle's best days are behind it.
One thread still tugs the other way: live sports. Marquee events — hockey above all — remain the single strongest reason many Canadians keep a TV package, which is exactly why leagues and their broadcast partners guard those rights so fiercely. But even that anchor is loosening as games migrate onto paid streaming apps of their own. We dug into that shift in our look at watching NHL without cable in Canada: the last free national broadcast is gone and the games now sit behind their own streams, which nudges even sports diehards toward the cordless column.
| Where the money is moving | 2025 | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional pay-TV revenue | $6.2B | Falling ~5%/year |
| Streaming (OTT) revenue | $4.8B | Rising ~11-15%/year |
| Cordless Canadian households | 48.5% | Rising toward 57% by 2028 |
What Cordless Households Are Actually Doing
Cutting the cord doesn't look the same in every home. Convergence's data points to a few recurring patterns. Some households go fully à la carte, rotating a couple of streaming apps in and out around the shows and seasons they care about. Others keep a lean, permanent core — one big catalogue service plus a live-TV solution — and simply refuse to let the stack grow. A shrinking group hangs on to a stripped-down "skinny" cable tier purely for local news or a sports channel. What almost nobody does anymore is pay full price for the everything-included cable bundle; that's the format the numbers show quietly emptying out, one household at a time.
What It Means for Cord-Cutters
Here's the honest catch buried in the good news. Cutting the cord saves money only if you don't rebuild the cable bundle one app at a time. It's easy to end up subscribed to Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, a sports service and a live-TV workaround — five bills, five renewal dates, and each one nudging its price up (leading providers averaged a 7% hike in 2025). Stack enough of them and you can quietly land right back at the cable-sized total you were trying to escape. The rise of ad-supported plans is part of the same squeeze; we covered that in our look at Netflix ads taking over streaming in Canada.
That's exactly the problem an all-in-one service is meant to solve. Instead of a scattered stack, an IPTV subscription puts live TV, sports and on-demand content in one app for a single flat fee — no set-top box, no contract, no juggling five separate apps to find what's on tonight. It runs on gear you already own: a Firestick, an Android box, a smart TV or your phone.
That single-bill approach is what Easy IPTV is built for, and it's aimed squarely at the households driving this shift. If you're still leaning on a cable package mostly for live channels, our guide to watching live TV without cable in Canada walks through the options, and our installation guide covers setup in minutes. The sensible way to decide is to test it against your real total: start a free trial, check that the channels and content you actually watch are included, and compare the all-in number to what you're paying across cable or a pile of apps. Our FAQ page answers the common questions before you commit. This isn't about cutting corners on what you owe for content — it's about paying once, predictably, instead of feeding a stack of bills that keeps climbing.
The Bottom Line
The 2026 data confirms what a lot of living rooms already knew: cord cutting in Canada has moved from trend to tipping point. Nearly half of households are already cordless, the cordless majority arrives this year, cable revenue is falling about 5% annually, and streaming is on track to overtake traditional TV revenue by 2027. The pay-TV bundle isn't vanishing overnight, but it's clearly the format on the way out. The trap to avoid is trading one oversized bill for five smaller ones that add up to the same thing. Whether you go all-in-one or keep a lean handful of apps, the winning move in 2026 is the same: know your true monthly total, and stop paying for a bundle — cable or streaming — that's quietly outgrown what you actually watch.