WHAT WERE THE MOST DEMANDED SERIES IN CANADA DURING MARCH?

In its latest study about SVOD demand in Canada, Parrot Analytics revealed which were the most outstanding series in the country during March using “demand expressions,” the global standard metric created by the company to represent the total demand expressed by the audience of a series within a market.

The demand reflects the desire, engagement, and viewership of television content and is weighted by importance; so a stream/download is a higher expression of demand than a “like” or a comment.

The ten most demanded titles by Canadian audiences in March 2020 were dominated by sci-fi titles. Six of the ten series are set in space, and two more have other sci-fi elements. The most demand of these titles was CBS All Access' “Star Trek: Picard,” which also was the overall most demanded digital original series. The newest entry in the Star Trek franchise premiered on January 23, and due to earlier distribution deals, is available in in Canada on cable channels CTV Sci-fi & Z and on the streaming service Crave, but not on CBS All Access.

The second and third most demanded series are both Star Wars titles from new streaming service Disney+. Canada was one of the launch markets for the service and Canadians could sign up for Disney+ on November 12, 2019. “The Mandalorian” premiered on that day and finished releasing on December 27, but has maintained demand in Canada well and remains the second most in-demand series three months later. The revival season 7 of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” began airing on February 21, 2020, and ranks third for March.

Season 2 of far future sci-fi drama “Altered Carbon” was released on February 27 on Netflix. A tie-in anime film set before the first season was also released this month on March 19. Canadians responded positively to these releases and “Altered Carbon” was the sixth most in-demand digital original in March. It was also the series that had the largest demand growth from last month out of the ten titles featured, rising from rank 24th in Canada in February.

This month, six different services have a series in the top ten, with no one service accounting for more than 30% of the titles. This demonstrates a fundamental change in the market: as recently as 2018 it was common for 80%+ of the series to be from the same service.