Crave gets tons of new content, and some is free

Bell has introduced a major expansion to Crave that adds a suite of new content and user experience tweaks.

Rolling out today to users across Canada, the newly updated Crave brings more than 10,000 hours of content and a variety of new personalization options for users at no additional cost.

“It’s about delivering a super clean, modern, engaging consumer experience that gets people into more content faster,” Jerrell Jimerson, Bell Media’s senior vice president and head of product and experience, tells MobileSyrup. “How do we just make this the best experience and the best destination for Canadian consumers?”

In a product briefing, Jimerson walked us through all of the changes while discussing the roles that avenues like AI and free ad-supported television (FAST) channels will play in the future of Crave. Here’s what we learned.

Content

First off, there’s the new programming. Historically, Bell has more clearly delineated between its TV channels and their corresponding websites and Crave, but the lines between all of that are now blurring. This means that a suite of content that was typically only on the likes of CTV or Bell’s French-language content site Noovo will now be available directly on Crave.

This includes:

• Ad-supported free catalogue of movies and shows, including CTV Movies and CTV Throwback, that were previously only available on CTV.ca and Noovo.ca.
• Live entertainment events like the Oscars, Emmys and Gala Québec Cinéma.
• Live local and national news from both CTV News and Noovo Info (includes newscasts, major events like election night broadcasts and specials).
• Select sports events like CFL, PGA Tour, F1 and FIFA

That first point is especially interesting, as it means users will be able to stream select ad-supported content on Crave using only a free Bell account, no paid Crave membership required. It speaks to the increasing demand for free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) offerings as more and more consumers look to tighten the belt. According to a Roku survey earlier this year, 85 per cent of respondents said they consume content with in-stream ads.

Crave itself launched lower-cost ad-enabled memberships in 2023, following the suit of other streamers. But now, it’s introducing FAST offerings on Crave directly. Jimerson says these options have become a key part of the Crave experience.

“The reality is, giving consumers choice in terms of price point is critical. There are a ton of streaming options out there, and different people have different budgets. So flexibility is important, and there’s just a lot of great content that can be made available on an ad-supported basis,” he says. “I think FAST is probably the fastest — if that’s okay to say — growing segment of the streaming world at this point. I think the ad-supported [option] is super important, and consumers want it.”

To differentiate between the premium and ad content, Crave will also now display a little message that says “ads” in the corner of content tiles so paid members know which titles will run ads. Those on free accounts, meanwhile, will see a little shopping cart displayed on premium content that isn’t ad-supported, and clicking on it will explain how to access it, be that through a regular Crave subscription or Starz add-on.

Altogether, Bell says Crave now has more than 40,000 total hours of content across all of its different movie and TV categories, including HBO titles like The Last of Us, The White Lotus and House of the Dragon, and original series like Letterkenny, Shoresy and this week’s new hockey drama, Heated Rivalry. 

With all of this new content, including live programming, I ask Jimerson whether Crave’s streaming infrastructure has been improved. After all, popular HBO shows like The Last of Us and House of the Dragon have led to crashes and other performance issues. In response, Jimerson says “a lot of foundational rebuild” has been done across Crave for the big update.

“There’s been a lot of work to improve all of the systems that enable what Crave is. I was in a meeting the other day at Bell and someone was like, ‘Is all of this new content going to create performance issues?’ No!” he says with a laugh. “Incremental content does not create performance issues. But buffering and start times are super high priority for us. We have a whole set of benchmarks relative to the current version of Crave and work on all of those dimensions to make sure that we are in the ballpark competitively across all platforms.”

User experience

Accompanying Crave’s larger programming slate is a litany of updates to the user experience (UX).

In particular, the streamer is adding a bunch of tools for greater UX personalization. When you sign onto Crave, you’ll be asked to pick at least three titles from an assortment of movies and TV shows, and the service’s algorithm will begin to offer more custom suggestions accordingly. This includes the curated “Top Picks for You” section, which can be updated as often as every three hours.

Jimerson says the algorithm will also factor in how much premium vs. free content you’re watching and make suggestions accordingly. “If you engage heavily with ad-supported content, the algorithms will show you more on your page. If you don’t engage with it, you will see less on your page,” he says.

Naturally, all this talk about algorithms brings to mind the larger conversation surrounding AI, especially as streamers embrace it in ways beyond content curation. For instance, Prime Video recently began testing AI-generated video recaps, while Disney+ suggested that subscribers would eventually be able to use AI to make their own shorts. That begs the question, then: how will Crave continue to use AI going forward?

“I would say right now it’s very personalization-focused, not so much creating content,” says Jimerson. That said, he notes how in the U.S., there are examples of streamers like ESPN allowing consumers to use AI to generate “personalized clippings of existing content,” which he admits is a “pretty interesting” concept.

“So I think there are big opportunities there, but that’s on the horizon. I think for content discovery, there are big opportunities for sort of AI-enhanced search, but more on the horizon than you’re going to see [now].”

While AI is helping to create a more personalized experience, Crave is also introducing new standardized sections that everyone will see. One of these will be a new tab for Live TV that is displayed like the guide you might see on a cable box, while another will be a “Top 10 in Canada” to show what’s most popular across the country.

But one that Jimerson is especially excited about is the new Feature Row, which Crave will regularly update to highlight different aspects of the service. In our briefing demo, new FAST titles were shown here, but Jimerson notes that it can be used to promote the likes of Crave and Disney+ streaming bundles, specific content tied to sporting events like FIFA, sponsorships for advertisers and more.

And finally, Crave is improving support for different languages, especially French. Jimerson says the goal was to make the French experience feel “first-class and not second-tier” by introducing multi-language playback.

In our demo, I saw a clip from the Friends pilot in which options for languages and subtitles were embedded into the stream, removing the need to fiddle through external menus. What’s more, these options can be toggled in real-time without interrupting playback. It worked pretty seamlessly in the demo, even when Monica’s (Courteney Cox) English lines changed to French audio. Crave says this will also work for whatever other languages a given title might support.

And going back to the personalization angle, Crave will remember your language settings going forward. This will carry over across different user profiles that may have unique preferences. It also means that bilingual users might even get a mix of English and French content suggested to them, depending on how much of each they’re watching.

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The new Crave experience is now available at no additional cost to users across Canada. The service starts at $11.99/month for Standard with Ads and $22/month for Premium. It’s also worth noting that annual plans are 40 per cent off until December 1 for Black Friday.

Image credit: Crave