The CEO of Corus Entertainment says the outlook for Canadian media companies remains challenging as the industry adjusts to changing viewer habits and lower demand from advertisers.

Doug Murphy said that Corus has made recent inroads recapturing audiences by transitioning from a traditional TV broadcaster to one with a presence across multiple platforms, but advertisers remain leery.

“We have made great progress in what we describe as our ‘video first’ strategy that's moving beyond being a television broadcaster to being an aggregator of premium video content across all platforms,” he told BNN Bloomberg in a Friday interview.

“(It’s) off to the races on an audience perspective – the challenge is demand.”

Murphy said that despite that challenge, which is being felt by media companies across the world, he’s optimistic advertisers will eventually come back around.

“It's not just at Corus, in fact, it's a worldwide thing. Traditional broadcasters still are delivering a lot more audiences than advertisers want to purchase,” he said.

“We think that is going to change, but at the moment, that's the picture we’re looking at.”

Murphy’s comments came after Corus reported quarterly results before markets opened on Friday. The company posted a $9.8 million loss in the second quarter as revenue fell 13 per cent.

Looking ahead, it says it expects a year-over-year decline in television advertising revenue in its third quarter in the range of 10 to 15 per cent. Corus stock was down as much as 21 per cent in midday trading following the results.

The disappointing quarterly earnings were still an improvement on the $15.5 million the company lost a year earlier, and Murphy said Corus has made progress in mitigating some of its recent losses by cutting costs and improving cash flow to pay down debt.

He added that despite that progress, cost-cutting measures will need to continue for the time being.

“Absent a meaningful revenue recovery, all of us need to find ways to offset those declines, and frankly speaking, it's an opportunity for us to get refocused,” Murphy said.

“So if video first is the audience strategy, our cost strategy we call ‘fit for the future,’ and that's about streamlining our operating model and rationalizing our asset base… if it's not in service of video first, then why are we doing it?”

With files from The Canadian Press