Viewers Choice was a Canadian English language pay-per-view (PPV) and near video on demand service. It was owned by Viewers Choice Canada Inc., which at the time of its closure was majority-owned and managed by Bell Media, with minority partners Rogers Media and ESPN Inc., and had been carried by various cable and IPTV service providers, primarily in Eastern Canada.
Launched in September 1991, Viewers Choice was the first pay-per-view service permitted to operate in Eastern Canada (a counterpart in Western Canada also used the Viewers Choice brand name for several years), and was the sole English-language PPV provider in that region until 1999. However, it shut down on September 30, 2014, as the service's two main owners at the time, Bell and Rogers, had each gained full ownership of a competing general-interest PPV service (Vu! and Sportsnet PPV respectively). Viewers Choice said it would be working with its remaining partner service providers to transition to other pay-per-view services.
Overview
The Viewers Choice pay-per-view service consisted of 45 standard-definition channels and two high-definition channels. Programming included movies, concerts, live combat sport events such as boxing and mixed martial arts (UFC), and live professional wrestling events (WWE, WCW, ECW, and TNA). Pornographic content was also available through the Adam and Eden services. Adam featured content for homosexual men, while Eden featured content of interest to heterosexual men.
Although Viewers Choice (and pay-per-view services in general) continued to be a main provider of big-ticket live events, much of their movie content had been duplicated by video on demand (VOD) services operated by cable and IPTV companies (and as noted below, Viewers Choice was not available on any Canadian satellite provider, from late 2007 to its closure in 2014). As a result, many cable systems had been slowly reducing the number of pay-per-view channels carried.
In an effort to compete with VOD, Viewers Choice launched "All Day Ticket," which allowed customers to purchase a movie for up to a 24-hour time period until 6:00 AM (local time) the next day, and view the movie as many times as they wished until the time period expired.
History
Launch as monopoly provider
In March 1991, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) granted a broadcasting licence to Viewer's Choice Canada to operate a regional pay-per-view service serving Eastern Canada (Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces). Viewer's Choice Canada was a partnership between Astral Communications with 50.1%, Rogers Pay Per View Inc. (a subsidiary of what is now called Rogers Media) with 24.95%, and TSN Enterprises (part of what is now known as CTV Specialty Television Inc.) with 24.95%.
The service launched on September 5, 1991 using the "Viewer's Choice" name on-air. For its first year and a half, it used the same graphics and logos as the Viewer's Choice service in the United States (now In Demand). In early 1993, Viewer's Choice introduced its own logo and on-screen CGI idents, which were used until April 2004. The old logo was 3 triangles with a rectangle with the words "VIEWER'S CHOICE". The name was later simplified to "Viewers Choice" without an apostrophe, and changed its logo to a more common logo with a new logo with 3 black rectangles with the banners. The upper has the word "VIEWERS", and the lower has the word "CHOICE". Originally, Viewer's Choice was the monopoly provider of pay-per-view service in Eastern Canada, while Western International Communications (WIC) was granted a similar monopoly for its Home Theatre service in Western Canada, mirroring the regions held by Astral and WIC for pay television service (The Movie Network and Superchannel, respectively). However, from 1993 until 2007, Home Theatre operated under the Viewers Choice name and used the same satellite feeds.
Entering competition
Viewers Choice's monopoly on pay-per-view service in Eastern Canada ended in 1999, when Bell ExpressVu (now Bell Satellite TV) was permitted to launch its own PPV service, Vu!, dropping Viewers Choice in the process. Shortly thereafter, Vu! also began offering pay-per-view service to other service providers, meaning that Viewers Choice was now competing with Vu! for the right to supply cable providers, though on any given service provider only one of these services would be made available to customers.