Broadcasting and content providers
This subsector comprises establishments primarily engaged in operating radio or television broadcasting stations for programming and transmission to the public. Programming may originate in their own studio, from an affiliated network, or from external sources. This subsector also comprises establishments primarily engaged in providing media streaming distribution services, operating media broadcasting, satellite and cable television networks, and supplying information, such as news reports, articles, pictures, and features, to the news media. These may operate by cable systems, satellite transmission or over the Internet. These establishments distribute textual, audio, and/or video content of general or specific interest. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 1,638
- Under 10 employeesA
- 62%
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 1,638 Canadian establishments with employees, 62% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 516, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Licensed broadcasting is consolidating and shrinking. Streaming and online content have no licence barrier and no distribution guarantee.
- Who sets the price
- Advertisers and distributors; regulators license spectrum.
- The software it runs on
- Broadcast traffic, playout and ad-sales systems.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
A small-market radio station is the enterable thing in this group: a CRTC licence, a transmitter, a few staff, and the merchants of one town as advertisers. 673 of Canada's 1,189 broadcasting establishments employ fewer than ten people [A], and stations change hands regularly. The pre-screen cut this on licences and spectrum. The screen finds the licence is the smaller problem. The revenue the licence protects is shrinking. Trade reporting of the CRTC's 2024–25 market report puts commercial radio at $1.06B, down 2.6%, and private conventional television at $1.17B, down 7.3%, on a PBIT margin of −40.4%, while online services took about 40% of all broadcasting revenue [B]. A licence is a protected position in a market advertisers are leaving, and the protection does not extend to the platforms taking the money. Stingray shows what it takes to stand still: its radio segment held $132.4M of revenue, flat, at a 31.3% adjusted EBITDA margin in fiscal 2026 [A], with growth in digital advertising only offsetting the fall in airtime sales. That margin is a group result — shared programming, national sales representation and engineering spread across a portfolio of stations. The single station has the same decline without the shared cost base, and its eventual exit is a sale to one of those groups at the buyer's price. Television is cut more simply: the sector's operating margin is deeply negative before an entrant has bought a camera. Streaming and online audio have no licence barrier and sit outside this group.
A music streaming service is a licence business: every service rents the same catalogue from the same few rights holders, on terms set as a share of its own revenue. That makes the gross margin the thing an entrant is buying, and the incumbents publish it. Spotify took €17,186M of revenue in 2025 and spent €11,690M on cost of revenue, which it says consists predominantly of royalty and distribution costs — a 32% gross margin at 290 million paying subscribers [A]. Major-label content was about 72% of the label-delivered streams it served [A], so the four licensors that matter (Universal, Sony, Warner and the indie agency Merlin) negotiate with Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Google before they negotiate with anyone else. Below Spotify the margin thins out: SiriusXM's Pandora and Off-platform segment paid $1,308M of revenue share and royalties on $2,141M of flat revenue, while Pandora's monthly active users fell 5% to 41.1 million [A]; Deezer, with eighteen years of operating history, reached its first positive adjusted EBITDA in 2025 — €9.7M on €534M of revenue, under 2% [B]. The statutory side is no cheaper for a newcomer: in the US the Copyright Royalty Board's Phonorecords IV schedule raises the songwriters' headline rate on interactive streaming from 15.1% of service revenue in 2023 to 15.35% in 2027 [B], and non-interactive streams pay SoundExchange per performance — $0.0028 per performance in 2026 rising to $0.0032 in 2030 for commercial broadcasters' streams, with a per-station minimum [A]. None of these rates falls with volume in a way a small service can exploit; scale is what earns the direct deals and the marketing reach, and three of the largest competitors (Apple, Amazon, Google) run music inside a bundle where it does not need to make money at all. Defensibility decides it: an entrant pays the same royalty share as Spotify, offers the same catalogue, and has no product it can withhold from the incumbents. The niches that survive do so by owning a rights or audience corner the generalists ignore — DJ mixes (Mixcloud spent years licensing through collecting societies before signing a direct, multi-year deal with Universal in 2018 [B]), DJ-tool streaming (Beatport absorbed Beatsource into one service [A]), hi-res and classical (Qobuz, IDAGIO), and emerging-market and hip-hop catalogues (Audiomack) — and the best-known independent among them, SoundCloud, was forecast at only €2M of positive EBITDA on €288M of revenue for 2023 when its owners explored a sale above $1B [B]. Canada adds a moving regulatory cost: the CRTC's 2024 Online Streaming Act decision required large unaffiliated services to pay 5% of Canadian revenue into content funds; payments were stayed from December 2024, Spotify was among the challengers, and a July 2026 Justice Department letter to the Federal Court of Appeal said the government intends to eliminate the base contribution [B]. Performance and neighbouring-rights royalties still flow through SOCAN and Re:Sound. This record differs from its neighbours: 5161 is a licensed over-the-air radio station selling local airtime; 5122 is the hosting and ad-insertion software podcasters use; 513 is title and rights software sold to publishers. This is the consumer-facing service that licenses recorded music and streams it.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
The customer here is 5161 as it now exists: licensed radio and TV stations, and the far larger number of creators, churches, schools and companies who broadcast online with no licence at all. The software does in a browser or on a desktop what a control room did: switch scenes and cameras, bring in remote guests, lay on graphics, send one programme to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and LinkedIn at once, and, for audio, run an internet radio station's playlist, automation and stream. This record is the production tool; the licensed station itself is 5161-commercial-radio-station-licence, creator analytics and sponsorship tools are 5162-creator-economy-and-streaming-analytics-software, podcast hosting is 5122-podcast-hosting-and-monetisation-platforms, and post-production pipeline tracking is 512110-video-production-pipeline-software. The price of the core product is zero, and the platforms keep it there. OBS Studio is free and open source (about 77,000 GitHub stars) [A], and its sponsor wall lists Twitch, YouTube, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and Logitech [C]: the platforms and the hardware makers pay to keep the default free. Twitch gave up its own tool, Twitch Studio, on 30 May 2024 because it carried under 4% of hours streamed, and pointed users to OBS, Streamlabs Desktop, XSplit, vMix and others [B]. Streamlabs is itself a free OBS-based desktop with paid add-ons; Logitech bought it in 2019 for about $89M cash plus up to $29M in stock tied to revenue targets [B], and runs it as part of Logitech G. The paid layer is held by owners with deep pockets and a habit of raising prices. StreamYard, the browser studio, was bought by Hopin for $250M in January 2021 and sold with Hopin's remaining products to Bending Spoons in April 2024, terms undisclosed [B]. Its pricing page now shows Core at $44.99/mo ($35.99 annual) and Advanced at $88.99 ($68.99 annual) [C]; reports of large post-acquisition rises come only from rivals and are UNVERIFIED. Restream (Austin; multistreaming plus a browser studio) raised a $50M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures and Insight Partners in 2020, claiming 2M+ streamers then [B]. Riverside, recording-first but with live, raised $47M to April 2022 [B]. Desktop switchers are owner-run and profitable-looking but publish nothing: vMix (StudioCoast, Australia; perpetual licences $60–$1,200) [C], Ecamm Live (Mac) [C], and Wirecast, still a Telestream product (footer: Telestream 2 LLC, 2026) [C]. Internet radio is the same pattern, consolidated into broadcasters. AzuraCast is free, self-hosted and open source [A]. RadioKing (3,000+ stations in 170+ countries) was bought outright by NRJ Group's towerCast in June 2023 [A]. SAM Broadcaster's maker Spacial says it was acquired in 2009, by Triton Digital per its earlier pages [C]. Live365 sits inside SoundStack and sells by bundling US music licensing (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, SoundExchange) [C], which is the real lock-in for a small station — the royalty paperwork, not the software. Centova Cast (a Canadian control panel sold through hosting resellers), Radio.co (UK) and mAirList (Germany) are small private vendors [C]. Willingness to pay decides it. Hobbyists and most creators use the free tool; the professional buyer who will pay is already served by four or five well-funded or corporate-owned products, and the internet-radio buyer pays for licensing and hosting, which broadcasters (NRJ, SoundStack) already bundle. The one open seam is a narrow one — a Canadian-licensing bundle for small internet stations (SOCAN/Re:Sound/CONNECT tariffs) analogous to Live365's US bundle — and it was not tested at screen.
Two different buyers wear the same label. Brand-side campaign tools sell to marketers and are already consolidated; creator-side tools sell to individuals who churn out of the profession itself, not merely out of the product. Neither half offers a durable acquisition channel that is not itself a platform that can close. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
The rules are set by three platform owners, and two of them give the technology away. Every streamer, broadcaster, OTT service or e-learning video platform that licenses studio or sports content must encrypt it so it plays only in a content decryption module (CDM) on the viewer's device. There are three that matter. Google's Widevine is in Chrome, Android and most smart TVs; Google says it is on '5 billion' devices and describes its solutions as 'free-to-use' [C, vendor]. Apple's FairPlay Streaming is the only option on Safari, iOS and Apple TV, and Apple approves production credentials only for 'a streaming service to consumers'. It refuses 'third-party accounts acting on behalf of content owners or licensees' [A, Apple developer page]. Microsoft's PlayReady (Edge, Xbox, many TVs and set-top boxes) is licensed by Microsoft in three forms: server, intermediate product and final product/device [A, Microsoft licensing page]. None of the three sells a turnkey service to a streamer. They write the robustness rules, certify devices and decide which security levels unlock 4K. What is sold is the layer between them: the multi-DRM licence server. A vendor hosts the key store and issues Widevine, FairPlay and PlayReady licences from one API, priced per licence or per subscriber. That layer is crowded. It has the conditional-access houses that moved from set-top boxes to streaming (Irdeto, NAGRA, Verimatrix), the cloud specialists (castLabs, Axinom, EZDRM, BuyDRM, DoveRunner) and video platforms that bundle DRM (JWP, which bought VUALTO in 2021 [B]). The money is moving from the licence server to forensic watermarking and anti-piracy. That means tracing a leaked stream to the subscriber who leaked it, then taking pirate streams down during live sport, which Friend MTS, NAGRA and Verimatrix sell as services. The two listed incumbents are shrinking or flat. Verimatrix's 2025 revenue fell 19% to $46.5M (from $57.2M). It is selling its mobile app-protection line and refocusing on 'anti-piracy (video protection), the Group's core business' [A, results filing]. Kudelski's Core Digital Security segment (NAGRA/NAGRAVISION) made $229.0M, down 1.9%. Inside it, watermarking and streaming protection grew 'close to 40%' while legacy smart cards and set-top hardware ran off [A, annual results]. Irdeto belongs to MultiChoice, which Canal+ took over in September 2025. Canal+ has announced 'a restructuring programme at Irdeto' [B, Sunday Times, 2026-03-11]. E-book DRM is a separate, smaller and older market. Adobe Content Server (ADEPT) still sits behind most retailer and library e-book lending, and Adobe says it 'has no plans to discontinue support of ACS 4.x' [A, Adobe FAQ]. Readium LCP is the open alternative run by the non-profit EDRLab: it is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 23078-2:2024), its server is open-source, and it has 'no cost per transaction', only a yearly certification fee [A, EDRLab]. Defensibility decides it. A newcomer cannot own the cryptography, because the CDMs belong to Google, Apple and Microsoft. Apple's credential rule means the FairPlay keys belong to the streamer, which lowers switching costs between licence servers. The service layer already has more than a dozen vendors with public price lists, and the best-known ones are reporting shrinking or flat revenue. The open niche is anti-piracy operations (live-sport takedown, watermark detection), and that is a services business more than SaaS. How this differs from its neighbours: 513-publishing-editorial-and-rights-management covers rights and royalties administration (who owns a title and what is owed), not encryption. 5162-creator-economy-and-streaming-analytics-software covers creator tools and audience analytics. 541514-dam-digital-asset-management stores and governs files inside a company; DRM protects them after they leave it.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Companies in this industry · 64
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeezerPrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers51621 | €534M | 1/15 |
| ApplePrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers5162 | — | 1/17 |
| iHeartMediaNASDAQ:IHRT | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers51621 | — | 2/15 |
| StreamElementsPrivate | Radio and television broadcasting stations5161 | — | 1/32 |
| StreamlabsPrivate | Radio and television broadcasting stations5161 | — | 2/32 |
| Amazon MusicPrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers51621 | — | 3/15 |
| Apple MusicPrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers51621 | — | 4/15 |
| AspirePrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers5162 | — | 2/17 |
| AudiomackPrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers51621 | — | 5/15 |
| AxinomPrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers5162 | — | 3/17 |
| AzuraCastPrivate | Radio and television broadcasting stations5161 | — | 3/32 |
| BeatportPrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers51621 | — | 6/15 |
| Bell MediaPrivate | Radio and television broadcasting stations5161 | — | 4/32 |
| BuyDRMPrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers5162 | — | 4/17 |
| CastlabsPrivate | Media streaming distribution services and other media networks and content providers5162 | — | 5/17 |
And 49 more on the companies page.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Information and cultural industries, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
2 rows sit directly beneath 516, and 10 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.